Pre-flare and active region plasma flows and structure seen by the short wavelength camera on SOLAR-C/EUVST

Abstract The mechanisms triggering solar flares and driving coronal heating occur across wide temperature ranges on small spatial scales and short timescales, making them difficult to observe with current instrumentation. The upcoming SOLAR-C mission, launching in the late 2020s, will provide unprecedented plasma diagnostic capability with its high-throughput extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) spectroscopic telescope (EUVST), capable of ${\sim}{0{^{\prime \prime}_{.}}2}$ pix$^{-1}$ spatial sampling ($\sim$${0{^{\prime \prime}_{.}}4}$ resolution), continuous temperature coverage from 0.02 to 15 MK, and exposure times down to 0.5 s. We present forward modelling of the spectrograph’s short wavelength camera (170.0–212.3 Å; SOLAR-C/EUVST-SW) and its response to $\log ~T \sim 6.2$ coronal plasma in a three-dimensional MHD-simulated pre-flare active region. We compare this performance to that of the previous-generation EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on Hinode (SOLAR-B). Our results demonstrate that SOLAR-C/EUVST can distinguish individual flux tubes in simulated active region loops, which Hinode/EIS cannot resolve. In simulated pre-flare plasma, SOLAR-C/EUVST captures sharp velocity gradients between adjacent upflowing and downflowing plasma which Hinode/EIS is unable to resolve. Doppler velocity measurement accuracy will reach better than 1 km s$^{-1}$ in active regions. We show that this next-generation spectrograph can be expected to directly observe processes potentially related to flare triggering, such as plasma flows from low-altitude reconnection linked to emerging flux, and determine whether active region loops consist of a small number of strands or the hundreds predicted by magnetic reconnection-induced nanoflare heating models.