STEAM
| STEAM | |
|---|---|
| Type: | Research satellite |
| Country: |
 People's Republic of China
|
| COSPAR-ID : | 2015-078A |
| Mission dates | |
| Dimensions: | 1850 kg |
| Size: | 1.5 m × 1.5 m × 1.2 m |
| Begin: | December 17, 2015 at 12:12 UTC |
| Starting place: | Jiuquan Cosmodrome |
| Launcher: | CZ-2D |
| Status: | active |
| Orbit data | |
| Orbit inclination : | 97.3 ° |
| Apogee height : | 505 km |
| Perigee height : | 499 km |
DAMPE (DArk Matter Particle Explorer or Wukong ) is a Chinese research satellite for astrophysics . It is one of five satellite missions under the Space Science Priority Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
mission
It was on December 17, 2015 12:12 UTC with a CZ-2D - carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in a Sun-synchronous orbit brought.
The three-axis stabilized satellite is equipped with measuring devices for high-energy electrons , gamma rays and the particles of cosmic rays and should thus help to track down the nature of dark matter . For electrons and photons the detection range is between 5 GeV and 10 TeV, the measurement accuracy at 800 GeV is one percent. Cosmic rays can be registered in the range from 100 GeV to 100 TeV. The satellite determines the directions from which the particles reach the earth with an accuracy of about a tenth of a degree. The satellite was jointly developed and built by research institutions in China, Italy and Switzerland. Among other things, the Department of Nuclear Physics and Particles at the University of Geneva was involved in the construction of the main detectors. DAMPE has a planned service life of three years.
It is named Wukong (chin .: 悟空) after the monkey king , the hero of the classical Chinese story The Journey to the West . Literally “Wu” (悟) means understanding and “Kong” (空) means emptiness, which means that his name can also be read as “understanding of emptiness”.
Instruments
DAMPE carries four stacked measuring systems. This includes two layers (for the x and y directions) of a plastic scintillator strip detector (PSD), which serve as an anti-coincidence detector. The strips are each 1 cm thick, 2.8 cm wide and 82 cm long, with as many strips placed next to one another that they cover a total area of 82 × 82 cm. This is followed by a silicon - tungsten tracker converter (STK), which consists of six double layers. Each consists of two layers of single-sided sensors ( single-sided AC-coupled silicon micro-strip detector ) which record the two orthogonal directions perpendicular to the alignment of the measuring device. In total, STK consists of 768 such sensors, which are each 9.5 × 9.5 cm in size and in turn consist of 768 strips each. Three layers of tungsten plates with a thickness of 1 mm are inserted in front of the tracking layer 2, 3 and 4 for photon conversion. STK achieves an angular release of 0.2 ° at 10 GeV. The STK is followed by an imaging calorimeter with a thickness of about 31 radiation lengths , which consists of 14 layers of bismuth germanium oxide bars with a size of 2.5 × 2.5 × 60 cm in a hodoscopic arrangement. The instrument achieves a resolution at the energy of 1.5% above 100 GeV. The evaluation is carried out with photon multipliers at both ends of the bars. A layer of neutron detectors is inserted at the bottom of the calorimeter. The total thickness of the bismuth germanium oxide calorimeter (BGO) and the STK correspond to about 33 radiation lengths. At the end there is a neutron detector (NUD), which is supposed to measure the delayed neutrons from the hadron particle shower and to help improve the electron / proton separation efficiency. The neutron detector consists of 16 plastic scintillator plates , each 1 cm thick and doped with boron , measuring 19.5 × 19.5 cm, each of which is read out by a photomultiplier .
Participating companies and institutes
- IHEP ( Institute of High Energy Physics ), CAS ( Chinese Academy of Sciences ), Beijing, China
- IMO (Institute of Modern Physics), CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Lanzhou, China
- NSSC ( National Space Science Center ), CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Beijing, China
- PMO ( Purple Mountain Observatory ), CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Nanjing, China
- USTC ( University of Science and Technology of China ), Hefei, China
- DPNC (Département de physique nucléaire et corpusculaire), University of Geneva , Switzerland
- INFN ( Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare ) and University of Perugia , Italy
- INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) and University of Bari , Italy
- INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) and Università del Salento , Italy
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b SinoDefence: China launches space telescope in search for Dark Matter ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 28, 2015
- ↑ a b Spectrum of Science: China's first research satellite DAMPE investigates cosmic rays , accessed on December 28, 2015
- ↑ xinhuanet.com: China's new Monkey King set for journey into space , accessed December 28, 2015
- ↑ Université de Genève - Département de physique nucléaire et corpusculaire: DAMPE , accessed on December 28, 2015
- ↑ nasaspaceflight.com: Chinese Long March 2D lofts DAMPE - A Dark Matter Investigator | NASASpaceFlight.com , accessed December 28, 2015
