Launch of the Space experiment PAMELA
Abstract
PAMELA is a satellite borne experiment designed to study with great accuracy cosmic rays of galactic, solar, and trapped nature in a wide energy range protons: 80 MeV-700 GeV, electrons 50 MeV-400 GeV). Main objective is the study of the antimatter component: antiprotons (80 MeV-190 GeV), positrons (50 MeV-270 GeV) and search for antimatter with a precision of the order of 10^-8). The experiment, housed on board the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite, was launched on June, 15, 2006 in a 350*600 km orbit with an inclination of 70 degrees. The detector is composed of a series of scintillator counters arranged at the extremities of a permanent magnet spectrometer to provide charge, Time-of-Flight and rigidity information. Lepton/hadron identification is performed by a Silicon-Tungsten calorimeter and a Neutron detector placed at the bottom of the device. An Anticounter system is used offline to reject false triggers coming from the satellite. In self-trigger mode the Calorimeter, the neutron detector and a shower tail catcher are capable of an independent measure of the lepton component up to 2 TeV. In this work we describe the experiment, its scientific objectives and the performance in the first months after launch.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0708.1808,
title = {Launch of the Space experiment PAMELA},
author = {M. Casolino and P. Picozza and F. Altamura and A. Basili and N. De Simone and V. Di Felice and M. P. De Pascale and L. Marcelli and M. Minori and M. Nagni and R. Sparvoli and A. M. Galper and V. V. Mikhailov and M. F. Runtso and S. A. Voronov and Y. T. Yurkin and V. G. Zverev and G. Castellini and O. Adriani and L. Bonechi and M. Bongi and E. Taddei and E. Vannuccini and D. Fedele and P. Papini and S. B. Ricciarini and P. Spillantini and M. Ambriola and F. Cafagna and C. De Marzo and G. C. Barbarino and D. Campana and G. De Rosa and G. Osteria and S. Russo and G. A. Bazilevskaja and A. N. Kvashnin and O. Maksumov and S. Misin and Yu. I. Stozhkov and E. A. Bogomolov and S. Yu. Krutkov and N. N. Nikonov and V. Bonvicini and M. Boezio and J. Lundquist and E. Mocchiutti and A. Vacchi and G. Zampa and N. Zampa and L. Bongiorno and M. Ricci and P. Carlson and P. Hofverberg and J. Lund and S. Orsi and M. Pearce and W. Menn and M. Simon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0708.1808},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication on Advances in Space Research