Measuring Cosmic Rays with the RadMap Telescope on the International Space Station

The RadMap Telescope is a new radiation-monitoring instrument operating in the U.S. Orbital Segment (USOS) of the International Space Station (ISS). The instrument was commissioned in May 2023 and will rotate through four locations inside American, European, and Japanese modules over a period of about six months. In some locations, it will take data alongside operational, validated detectors for a cross-check of measurements. RadMap’s central detector is a finely segmented tracking calorimeter that records detailed depth-dose data relevant to studies of the radiation exposure of the ISS crew. It is also able to record particle-dependent energy spectra of cosmic-ray nuclei with energies up to several hundred MeV per nucleon. A unique feature of the detector is its ability to track nuclei with omnidirectional sensitivity at an angular resolution of two degrees. In this contribution, we present the design and capabilities of the RadMap Telescope and give an overview of the instrument’s commissioning on the ISS

Assessing the Distribution of Water Ice and Other Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole with LUVMI-X: A Mission Concept

The search for exploitable deposits of water and other volatiles at the Moon’s poles has intensified considerably in recent years, due to the renewed strong interest in lunar exploration. With the return of humans to the lunar surface on the horizon, the use of locally available resources to support long-term and sustainable exploration programs, encompassing both robotic and crewed elements, has moved into focus of public and private actors alike. Our current knowledge about the distribution and concentration of water and other volatiles in the lunar rocks and regolith is, however, too limited to assess the feasibility and economic viability of resource-extraction efforts. On a more fundamental level, we currently lack sufficiently detailed data to fully understand the origins of lunar water and its migration to the polar regions. In this paper, we present LUVMI-X, a mission concept intended to address the shortage of in situ data on volatiles on the Moon that results from a recently concluded design study. Its central element is a compact rover equipped with complementary instrumentation capable of investigating both the surface and shallow subsurface of illuminated and shadowed areas at the lunar south pole. We describe the rover and instrument design, the mission’s operational concept, and a preliminary landing-site analysis. We also discuss how LUVMI-X fits into the diverse landscape of lunar missions under development

SDD Analog Readout System for the ComPol CubeSat Compton Polarimeter

Astronomical X-ray polarimetry is a powerful tool to extract information from hard X-rays spectrum of celestial bodies. In this context, the ComPol project aims to fly a Compton polarimeter in a CubeSat to investigate the emissions of the binary black hole (BBH) system Cygnus X-1. Based on Compton events detection, the CubeSat is featured by two detection systems: 1) a Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) matrix employed as scatterer and 2) a scintillator read by Silicon Photon Multiplier (SiPM) array to absorb the scattered photons. This paper focuses on the development of the first detection system for the reconstruction of Compton events. The readout electronic chain is composed of two 7-pixel SDD matrices, CUBE preamplifiers and SFERA ASIC Analog Pulse Processor (APP) handled by FPGA technology for its control and data flow management. This paper presents this readout system, composed by two boards: one housing SFERA ASIC, which includes an on-chip ADC, the other which includes the SDD matrix and the preamplifiers. In this manuscript, the test results performed with the pre-prototype system devised in the first phase of the project to characterize the SDD module and to evaluate the SFERA internal ADC performances are reported together with the ones performed with the prototype system

Calorimeter calibration of the ComPol CubeSat gamma-ray polarimeter

ComPol is a proposed CubeSat mission dedicated to long-term study of gamma-ray polarisation of astrophysical objects. Besides spectral and timing measurements, polarisation analysis can be a powerful tool in constraining current models of the geometry, magnetic field structure and acceleration mechanisms of different astrophysical sources. The ComPol payload is a Compton telescope optimised for polarimetry and consists of a 2 layer stacked detector configuration. The top layer, the scatterer, is a Silicon Drift Detector matrix developed by the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Politecnico di Milano. The second layer is a calorimeter consisting of a CeBr scintillator read-out by silicon photo-multipliers developed at CEA Saclay. This paper presents the results of the prototype calorimeter calibration campaign, executed in March 2022 at IJCLab Orsay and simulations of the expected performance of the polarimeter using updated performance figures of the detectors

LUVMI-X: A Versatile Platform for Resource Prospecting on the Moon

Our current knowledge about the Moon's resource potential is limited to remote-sensing measurements and the analysis of Apollo-era samples. Even though there are persistent indications for substantial deposits of water and other volatiles-especially in the lunar polar regions-high-resolution mapping and in-situ measurements are required to assess the technical feasibility and economic viability of exploiting them. The LUVMI-X mission will use a 50-kg rover equipped with complementary instrumentation to prospect illuminated and shadowed areas in the Moon's polar regions through the use of laser spectroscopy, neutron spectroscopy, and direct sampling in combination with mass spectroscopy. It will also analyze the regolith composition and characterize the surface radiation environment

COMPASS++/AMBER: Proposal for Measurements at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS Phase-1: 2022-2024

The Compass++/Amber (proto-)collaboration proposes to establish a “New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS” and perform in phase-1, i.e. starting in the year 2022, three experiments that will use either muons or hadrons delivered by the existing M2 beam line: (1) Proton charge radius measurement using muon-proton elastic scattering, (2) Drell-Yan and J/Psi production experiments using the conventional M2 hadron beam, (3) Measurement of proton-induced antiproton production cross sections for dark matter searches

Letter of Intent: A New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS (COMPASS++/AMBER)

A New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS COMPASS++/AMBE

A New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS: COMPASS++/AMBER

In this Letter of Intent, we propose a broad experimental programme for the ``New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS''. This unrivalled installation will provide the site for a great variety of measurements to address fundamental issues of Quantum Chromodynamics, which are expected to lead to significant improvements in the understanding of QCD as our present theory of strong interactions. The proposed measurements cover the range from lowest-$Q^2$ physics as the determination of the proton radius by elastic muon-proton scattering, over average-$Q^2$-reactions to study hadron spectroscopy, to high-$Q^2$ hadron-structure investigations using the Drell-Yan process and Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering