First flight of the Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar flares (GRIPS)

The Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar flares (GRIPS) high altitude balloon payload was successfully flown in January 2016 from Antarctica (Jan 19 to Jan 30).GRIPS provides a near-optimal combination of high-resolution imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry of solar-flare gamma ray/hard X-ray emissions from ~20 keV to >~10 MeV. GRIPS’s goal is to address questions raised by recent solar flare observations regarding particle acceleration and energy release, such as: What causes the spatial separation between energetic electrons producing hard X-rays and energetic ions producing gamma-ray lines? How anisotropic are the relativistic electrons, and why can they dominate in the corona? How do the compositions of accelerated and ambient material vary with space and time, and why? The spectrometer/polarimeter consists of six 3D position-sensitive germanium detectors (3D-GeDs), where each energy deposition is individually recorded with an energy resolution of a few keV FWHM and a spatial resolution <0.1 mm3. Imaging is accomplished by a single multi-pitch rotating modulator (MPRM), a 2.5-cm thick tungsten alloy slit/slat grid with pitches that range quasi-continuously from 1 to 13 mm. The MPRM is situated 8 meters from the spectrometer to provide excellent image quality and unparalleled angular resolution at gamma-ray energies (12.5 arcsec FWHM), sufficient to separate 2.2 MeV footpoint sources for almost all flares. Polarimetry is accomplished by analyzing the anisotropy of reconstructed Compton scattering in the 3D-GeDs, with an estimated minimum detectable polarization of a few percent at 150-650 keV in an X-class flare. GRIPS was also equipped with active BGO shields, and three piggy-back instruments: a solar terahertz radiometer (Solar-T), a hard X-ray spectrometer (SMASH), and a sonic anemometer (TILDAE).We will present an overview of GRIPS's first flight, the performance of its instruments and subsystems, including the solar pointing and aspect systems, and the current progress of our data analysis.