Ioffe Institute. Laboratory for Experimental Astrophysics
KW-Sun: Konus-Wind Solar Flare Database

Konus-Wind instrument

Konus-Wind is a joint US-Russian experiment launched on November, 1, 1994 to study gamma-ray bursts and solar flares. It consists of two NaI(Tl) detectors S1 and S2 observing correspondingly the southern and northern celestial hemispheres. The instrument operates in the interplanetary space (since 2004 – near Lagrange point L1), so it does not suffer from ”nights”, and, thus, has a very high duty cycle of about 95%. Thanks to being far from the Earth’s magnetosphere it has an exceptionally stable background.

Konus-Wind works in two modes: waiting mode and triggered mode. In the waiting mode the count rate light curves are available in three wide energy channels G1 (~20–80 keV), G2 (~80–300 keV), G3 (~300–1200 keV) with accumulation time 2.944 s.

Switching to the triggered mode occurs at a statistically significant excess of ~9 sigma above a background count rate within an interval of 1 s or 140 ms in the G2 energy channel. In the triggered mode Konus-Wind measures count rate light curves in the same three channels with a varying time resolution from 2 to 256 ms and with total duration of 250 s. While in the triggered mode, 64 multichannel spectra are taken in addition to the light curves as follows. The multichannel spectra are measured in two partially overlapping energy bands: now ~20–1200 keV and ~400 keV–15 MeV. Each of the bands have 63 energy channels. Accumulation time of the first four spectra is fixed at 64 ms and of the last eight spectra – at 8.192 s. For the remaining 52 spectra the accumulation time is adaptively adjusted from 0.256 s to 8.192 s based on the count rate in the G2 channel: for more intense events the accumulation time is proportionally shorter. After accumulation of energy spectra the instrument is inactive for ~1 hour, only light curve in G2 channel is available with accumulation time 2.944 s.

For more detailed instrument description see

Aptekar R. L., Frederiks D. D., Golenetskii S. V. et al. 1995, Space Sci. Rev., 71, 265

Konus-Wind Solar Flare Data

The presented database contains time profiles and energy spectra for solar flares registered by Konus-Wind in triggered mode.

List of solar flares registered by Konus-Wind in the triggered mode and spectra accumulation times are also presented in ASCII table here. This table contains flare number, Konus-Wind trigger date, trigger time in hh:mm:ss.ms format, trigger time in seconds since 00:00 UT, GOES class, time of flight from Wind spaсecraft to the Earth, time of flight corrected start time of spectrum accumulation, time of flight corrected end time of spectrum accumulation.

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

Description of Konus-Wind data: KW data info.

Disclaimer

The presented Konus-WIND X-ray pre-publication data are preliminary and may require further corrections.

Please contact us for any questions, comments and suggestions concerning the contents and presentation of the data.

If you find the archive helpful and use the presented data in your research, the authors would appreciate acknowledging this web-page and the following paper:

Lysenko A. L., Ulanov M. V., Kuznetsov A. A. et al. 2022, ApJS, 262, 1, 32

in your publications.

For guidance or collaboration please contact Alexandra Lysenko.