Speaker
Description
Summary:
INTA has the opportunity to fly a radiation monitor on-board the long duration stratospheric balloon flight Sunrise III as part of the TuMag Collaboration instrument.
The requirements of this monitor are:
• It should be completely autonomous, in terms of mechanical integration, power supply, data acquisition and storage during a long duration flight of at least 10 days.
• It should be simple, light-weight, robust, easy to integrate and operate, and low cost.
• It should detect primary cosmic rays events, measuring pulse amplitudes, and classify low energy particle and high energy particle detection events to calculate their relative flux.
This presentation will outline the solution developed by the Spanish SME Hidronav Technologies (http://www.hidronav.com/page2.html) based on the optimization and integration of two CosmicWatch desktop muon detector units (MIT open project development, http://www.cosmicwatch.lns.mit.edu/), based on small plastic scintillator slabs (25cm3), silicon photomultiplier readout and Arduino microcontroller.
Using the large data set of single and coincidence detection events from both scintillators, recording pulse amplitude measurements (and thereby energy deposition estimation), together with time-stamp and GPS location data, different particle fluxes will be derived and compared to previously simulated data. Cosmic-ray fluxes of different particles, at different locations along the balloon flight have been calculated by the PARMA model.
