Search

The data presented in this article are related to the research paper entitled “Observation of night-time emissions of the Earth in the near UV range from the International Space Station with the Mini-EUSO detector” (Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 284, January 2023, 113336, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113336). The data have been acquired with the Mini-EUSO detector, an UV telescope operating in the range 290-430 nm and located inside the International Space Station. The detector was launched in August 2019, and it has started operations from the nadir-facing UV-transparent window in the Russian Zvezda module in October 2019. The data presented here refer to 32 sessions acquired between 2019-11-19 and 2021-05-06. The instrument consists of a Fresnel-lens optical system and a focal surface composed of 36 multi-anode photomultiplier tubes, each with 64 channels, for a total of 2304 channels with single photon counting sensitivity. The telescope, with a square field-of-view of 44°, has a spatial resolution on the Earth surface of 6.3 km and saves triggered transient phenomena with a temporal resolution of 2.5 µs and 320 µs. The telescope also operates in continuous acquisition at a 40.96 ms scale. In this article, large-area night-time UV maps obtained processing the 40.96 ms data, taking averages over regions of some specific geographical areas (e.g., Europe, North America) and over the entire globe, are presented. Data are binned into 0.1° × 0.1° or 0.05° × 0.05° cells (depending on the scale of the map) over the Earth's surface. Raw data are made available in the form of tables (latitude, longitude, counts) and .kmz files (containing the .png images). These are – to the best of our knowledge – the highest sensitivity data in this wavelength range and can be of use to various disciplines.

International audience; JEM-EUSO is a large telescope looking at the earth from the ISS. It uses a huge volume of the earth's night sky atmosphere in which an extremely energetic cosmic ray particle (E>1019eV) generates a straight-line N2 fluorescence signal on the path of the cascade shower moving at the speed of light for a length of 10-100 km depending on the incident angle. The space-time resolved calorimetry of showers is achieved with a large-aperture Fresnel lens optics and a large-area focal surface of detectors. Such a system in space is capable of detecting thousands of events with energy above 1020 eV (>1000 super-LHC) in a few years of operation on orbit, allowing a particle channel of astronomy and for research of fundamental physics in the universe. Neutrino interaction cross-sections at such high energies are expected to increase in the Standard Model, and EUSO expects a reasonable chance of observing the cosmogenic neutrino events among those detectable showers, because the atmospheric target mass of the EUSO TPC exceeds 1 trillion tons. This experiment JEM-EUSO is currently considered by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for a possible payload on the Japan Experiment Module (JEM) of the International Space Station (ISS).

This is a status report of the HELLAZ project, in which a 20 bar He TPC is used to detect the recoil electrons coming from elastic scattering of solar neutrinos. Both the energy and direction (relative to the sun) are measured, allowing to reconstruct the neutrino energy. The measurement of direction of the very low energy electron is difficult. It requires to gather as much information as possible. Hence, it has been chosen to detect separately each individual ionization electron to get the maximum statistics which implies to have a gain in the end-cap detector of the TPC > 10$^6$, together with an X-Y capability. The R&D setup was moved a year ago from College de France, where it has been proven on one pixel that this gain is attainable, to Saclay, where a 10×10 cm$^2$ TPC with 64×64 strips is setup.

EUSO is 2.5 m diameter telescope to be installed on the International Space Station (ISS) to observe from above (∼400 km altitude), very high energy (10 19-21 eV) cosmic rays by detecting the UV light generated by the billions of electrons in the shower ionizing the atmosphere nitrogen. The European and Japanese parts of the collaboration depend on ESA for the mission and the results of phase A should be examined in November 2003.The US part of the collaboration has already been approved for phase B by NASA, to the condition of an OK by ESA. The extreme Universe Space Observatory

We report the status of the solar neutrino project called HELLAZ. In a high pressure time projection chamber filled with helium, the detection of each ionization electron of the track produced by the recoil electron from elastic scattering induced by solar neutrinos, will yield the low energy, high resolution solar neutrino spectrum. Two topics are presented: the preliminary test of the direction of the primary electron track from the cloud analysis and tests of Micromegas gas chambers giving a good discrimination between adjacent ionization electrons. These two tests seem rather encouraging.

Quartz-fiber calorimeters have been the object of an intense and fruitful work of research and development in the last few years. In this paper we report about the first application of this technique in an experiment. Namely, we describe the design and performance of the Zero-Degree Calorimeter (ZDC) used in NA50, a heavy-ion experiment at CERN SPS aiming to detect the formation of quark-gluon plasma in Pb–Pb collisions at 158 AGeV by studying the production of the charmonia states J/ψ and ψ′. The unique properties of the quartz-fiber calorimeters turn out to be well suited to match the specific requirements of this experiment that operates at beam intensity of about 10 7 Pb-ion/s: radiation hardness (up to a few Grads), short duration of the signal (∼10 ns), spatial resolution of a few hundreds of μm, small size of the detector (5×5×65 cm 3 ) and energy resolution adequate for providing a precise measurement of the collision centrality.

A new calorimetry technique based on shower sampling of Cherenkov light in optical fibers is presented. Fast response, excellent radiation hardness, insensitivity to neutrons, shower core detection and this technolgie's static (no gas, no liquids) properties make it an excellent candidate for Very Forward Calorimetry (VFCal) for the LHC.

The HPD is a nonmultiplicative light detector with typical gain of 1000 to 5000. Its development project, mainly supported by the CERN LAA project and by the INFN group V, was originally intended to find a replacement for the photo multiplier (PM) tubes for scintillating fibre calorimeter readout. After five years of development the HPD has become a versatile light detector, commercially available for everyday use, that can outperform PM tubes in photon counting efficiency and resolution, multi tesla magnetic field operation, uniformity of response, fast pulse dynamic range, and gain stability. The HPD has also a wide edge on PMs on pixelization potential and it is getting more and more competitive on timing properties. A review of the HPD performances and its latest advances are reported.

Calorimeters based on silicon core fibres embedded into an absorber have been simulated by combining the GEANT 3.16 package and a proprietary routine describing Cherenkov photon production in optical fibres. The good agreement between simulation results and experimental data allows to study, with a high degree of confidence, the design of a prototype hadronic detector and of different calorimeter configurations to cover the very forward regions of an LHC experiment.

Results on the light output of different kinds of silica fibres and on energy resolution and electromagnetic shower dimensions in small lead/quartz fibres calorimeter prototypes are presented, together with a possible design of a very forward calorimeter for LHC.

Tables are presented for observed properties of the nuclear gamma rays emitted following the bombardment of 24,26 Mg, 27 Al, and 28 Si targets with 14 N, 16,18 O, and 19 F beams. Energy, emitting nucleus, intensity, and angular-distribution coefficients are listed for each gamma where known. The beam energies were between 20 and 60 MeV. The gamma rays are from various final nuclei produced by the fusion of projectile and target nuclei into a compound nucleus and the subsequent evaporation of a few light particles.