The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) provides multiple simultaneous highresolution full-disk images of the corona and transition region up to 0.5 R above the solar limb with 1.5-arcsec spatial resolution and 12-second temporal resolution. The AIA consists of four telescopes that employ normal-incidence, multilayer-coated optics to provideThe Solar Dynamics Observatory

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) small explorer spacecraft provides simultaneous spectra and images of the photosphere, chromosphere, transition region, and corona with 0.33 -0.4 arcsec spatial resolution, two-second temporal resolution, and 1 km s −1 velocity resolution over a field-of-view of up to 175 arcsec × 175 arcsec. . IRIS is sensitive to emission from plasma at temperatures between 5000 K and 10 MK and will advance our understanding of the flow of mass and energy through an interface region, formed by the chromosphere and transition region, between the photosphere and corona. This highly structured and dynamic region not only acts as the conduit of all mass and energy feeding into the corona and solar wind, it also requires an order of magnitude more energy to heat than the corona and solar wind combined. The IRIS investigation includes a strong numerical modeling component based on advanced radiative-MHD codes to facilitate interpretation of observations of this complex region. Approximately eight Gbytes of data (after compression) are acquired by B. De Pontieu (B) ·Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

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ICON Far UltraViolet (FUV) imager contributes to the ICON science objectives by providing remote sensing measurements of the daytime and nighttime atmosphere/ionosphere. During sunlit atmospheric conditions, ICON FUV images the limb altitude profile in the shortwave (SW) band at 135.6 nm and the longwave (LW) band at 157 nm perpendicular to the satellite motion to retrieve the atmospheric O/N 2 ratio. In conditions of atmospheric darkness, ICON FUV measures the 135.6 nm recombination emission of O + ions used to compute the nighttime ionospheric altitude distribution. ICON Far UltraViolet (FUV) imager is a Czerny-Turner design Spectrographic Imager with two exit slits and corresponding back imager cameras that produce two independent images in separate wavelength bands on two detectors. All observations will be processed as limb altitude profiles. In addition, the ionospheric 135.6 nm data will be processed as longitude and latitude spatial maps to obtain images of ion distributions around regions of equatorial spread F. The ICON FUV optic axis is pointed 20 degrees below local horizontal and has a steering mirror that allows the field of view to be steered up to 30 degrees forward and aft, to keep the local magnetic meridian in the field of view. The detectors are micro channel plate (MCP) intensified FUV tubes with the phosphor fiber-optically coupled to Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs). The dual stack MCP-s amplify the photoelectron signals to overcome the CCD noise and the rapidly scanned frames are co-added to digitally create 12-second integrated images. Digital on-board signal processing is used to compensate for geometric distortion and satellite motion and to achieve data compression. The instrument was originally aligned in visible light by using a special grating and visible cameras. Final alignment, functional and environmental testing and calibration were performed in a large vacuum chamber with

Optical fibers have been found to exhibit an accelerated rate of strength reduction during static fatigue and zero stress aging for long times in aggressive environments. This phenomenon has been commonly referred to as the fatigue and aging "knee". The onset of the knee has been found to be highly variable and is sensitive to the polymer buffer coating. In past work we have shown that moisture vapor penetrates most polymer coatings on the time scale of minutes, which implies that the diffusion rate of small molecules is not the rate-determining step for aging. On the other hand, the diffusion of large molecules through the polymer coatings can take anywhere from weeks to years to reach the polymer I glass interface. The implication of this result is that large molecule diffusion might be the rate-determining step in aging. In the work presented here the diffusion of moisture and pH buffer solutions through various optical fiber coatings will be discussed. These results are correlated with the zero stress aging behavior ofthe same fibers.