A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR DECONVOLUTION OF DATA FROM INSTRUMENTS THAT MAKE INTEGRAL MEASUREMENTS, EG RIMS ON DE-1

A general method for deconvolving an unknown function from integral me asurements is described and applied to data from the instrument RIMS a board the spacecraft DE-1. The principal features of the method are: 1 . it uses objective criteria based upon fundamental statistical princi ples, i.e. Bayesian statistics; 2. it provides for insertion of prior knowledge in a non-prejudicial, explicit manner through the choice of breakpoints that determine the bicubic spline expansion functions; 3. it prevents random fluctuations from controlling the fit to the data t hrough the use of singular value decomposition and the elimination of small singular values; 4. it guards against the introduction of spurio us features into the result by including a penalty function and using the principle of generalized cross validation. Illustrative examples f rom RIMS data for H+ and O+ show that the method provides enhanced acc uracy and detail in deconvolving the ion phase space density.