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The Pamela apparatus will allow precise measurements of cosmic rays in Low Earth Orbit, mainly focusing on the antiparticles component. The apparatus is now ready for flight, and the launch is foreseen during June 2006. The paper briefly reports the status of the experiment, and the performances of the various components as measured before the launch.

EGLE is a wide frequency band search- coil magnetometer designed and built at the Roma Tre University. It has been installed onboard the ISS by the Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori on April 25, 2005 within the LAZIO- EGLE experiment carried out during the ENEIDE Soyuz mission. The scope of the experiment is to test EGLE in space and to investigate geomagnetic field variations. The main applications of EGLE are the study of electromagnetic environment inside the ISS, the correlation of magnetic field data with particle fluxes detected by LAZIO particle detector, and the monitoring of ionospheric perturbations possibly caused by Earth seismic activity. Since continuous electromagnetic field measurements on board the ISS are important for diverse space applications, a magnetometer with a suitable design is requested. Appropriate solutions for these applications, which have been adopted by EGLE, are in particular the use of 1- Wire technology and the possibility to detect by means of a search- coil magnetometer a large portion of the ULF frequency band, usually measured by flux- gate probes. To investigate the topside ionosphere electromagnetic environment and stability of Van Allen radiation belts in relation with seismic and anthropogenic electromagnetic emissions, a specific satellite mission (the ESPERIA project) has been designed for the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and up to now a few instruments of its payload have been built and tested in space. One of them is exactly the EGLE search- coil magnetometer. The first magnetic observations performed by this instrument reveal to be promising and demand for a further and deeper analysis based on a longer time series of data.

The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) was used to inspect collagen fibrils deposited on mica sheets at different fibrillogenesis times. Collagen was obtained from rat tail tendon fibers. Various fibril forms were observed, together with the characteristic periodic intra-fibril structure (D-bands). The fibril thickness, width, D-band periodicity and depth were measured and the statistical distribution of these parameters at 1, 2, 5, 10 and 15 days of in vitro fibril formation time was calculated. The fibrils showed an increasing size with time, but the band interval measure remained stable. The band depth, after an initial increase, exhibited a relative steadiness. The results indicate that AFM offers, at low resolution, images qualitatively similar to those obtained with electron microscopy, but with less manipulation of the sample. A quantitative evaluation of collagen structural features in the nanometer scale is made possible by AFM.

Silicon Photomultipliers (Si-PM) consist of an array of semiconductor photodiodes joint on the common substrate and operating in limited geiger mode. A new generation of Si-PM is currently under test in INFN Rome Tor Vergata facilities: they consist of a 5625 element, 3 * 3 mm 2 array with an improved light response. These elements have been characterized. Furthermore, a functional model of the Si-PM has been developed to be used in a VLSI development of front-end electronics.

The Sirad experiment aims to measure with great precision the cosmic ray radiation environment on the outside of the International Space Station. The detector, composed of a stack of 32 silicon detectors arranged in X–Y pattern and surmounted by a scintillator system, is capable of detecting nuclei from protons to Iron in the energy range between ≃ 30 MeV / n and ≃ 5 GeV / n .