PROBA2 – First Two Years of Solar Observation

(SWAP) telescope was launched on 2 November 2009 onboard the ESA PROBA2 tech-nological mission and has acquired images of the solar corona every one to two minutes for more than two years. The most important technological developments included in SWAP are a radiation-resistant CMOS-APS detector and a novel onboard data-prioritization scheme. Although such detectors have been used previously in space, they have never been used for long-term scientific observations on orbit. Thus SWAP requires a careful calibration to guarantee the science return of the instrument. Since launch we have regularly monitored the evolution of SWAP’s detector response in-flight to characterize both its performance and degradation over the course of the mission. These measurements are also used to re-duce detector noise in calibrated images (by subtracting dark-current). Because accurate measurements of detector dark-current require large telescope off-points, we also monitore