The Dark matter Nanosatellite Equipped with Skipper Sensors (DarkNESS) deploys a recently developed skipper-CCD architecture with sub-electron readout noise in low Earth orbit (LEO) to investigate potential signatures of dark matter (DM). The mission addresses two interaction channels: electron recoils from strongly interacting sub-GeV DM and X-rays produced through decaying DM. Orbital observations avoid attenuation that limits ground-based measurements, extending sensitivity reach for both channels. The mission proceeds toward launch following laboratory validation of the instrument. A launch opportunity has been secured through Firefly Aerospace's DREAM 2.0 program, awarded to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This will constitute the first use of skipper-CCDs in space and evaluate their suitability for low-noise X-ray and single-photon detection in future space observatories.
@article{arxiv.2505.16981,
title = {DarkNESS: A skipper-CCD NanoSatellite for Dark Matter Searches},
author = {Phoenix Alpine and Samriddhi Bhatia and Ana M. Botti and Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara and Claudio R. Chavez and Fernando Chierchie and Alex Drlica-Wagner and Rouven Essig and Juan Estrada and Erez Etzion and Roni Harnik and Terry Kim and Michael Lembeck and Qi Lim and Bernard J. Rauscher and Nathan Saffold and Javier Tiffenberg and Sho Uemura and Hailin Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.16981},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Submitted to Advances in Space Research. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2412.12084