The performance of the solo-vim instrument: Effects of instrumental noise and lossy data compression

Spectropolarimetric observations in photospheric lines reveal a wealth of information on physical parameters of the solar atmosphere like magnetic field strength and direction or the line-of sight velocity. These observations require the measurement of the four Stokes parameters at a sample of N wavelength positions around the core of the spectral line, resulting in 4N images for one observation. The Visible light Imager and Magnetograph (VIM) instrument on board Solar Orbiter is capable of performing these measurements. However, the data rate required to transfer all 4N images with the required cadence is well beyond the telemetry limit. Here we use realistic, three-dimensional MHD simulations in order to simulate science data provided by VIM which are then used to test various compression techniques. We conclude that lossy data compression and instrumental noise have similar effects on the output data.