Speaker
Description
The contribution aims at providing full comprehension of the impact that low-energy cosmic ray measurements performed by the Limadou collaboration have on our understanding and modelling of interstellar and interplanetary media, solar physics, space weather phenomena and ionosphere-magnetosphere coupling.
The Limadou project dates back to the early 2000s, when Italian and Chinese scientists started a collaboration to analyze the correlation of the seismic activity with phenomena observable with instruments placed in low-Earth orbit. They reached the first milestone of the project in February 2018, when the first CSES satellite was launched and put into operation, in the framework of a joint cooperation program between the Chinese and Italian Space Agencies. After commissioning, all payloads provided the scientific community with high-quality data concerning the electric and magnetic field, ionospheric plasma, x-rays, electrons, protons and nuclei. Finely binned time series are made publicly available for all these observational channels, allowing for a multi-messenger approach in the study of ionospheric perturbations.
Electrons and protons up to a few hundreds of MeV are measured with the High-Energy Particle Detector (HEPD), designed, constructed and operated by an Italian collaboration led by INFN. At the time of writing, the same group is assembling an upgraded version of the HEPD, to be hosted on the second satellite of the CSES constellation and placed in orbit by mid-2023.
I will briefly show figures for operational stability and in-flight performance of the HEPD onboard CSES-01. I will discuss the most important scientific results obtained so far, concerning time-dependent measurements of sub-GeV galactic cosmic rays, the estimation of trapped proton fluxes inside the South Atlantic Anomaly and the observation of geomagnetic storms.
Finally, I will describe the upgrade of HEPD for the CSES-02 satellite. I will show what makes it one of the most innovative space detectors for charged radiation, much more sensitive than its predecessor. I will discuss the scientific potential of multi-site measurements of high-energy particles trapped in both the inner and the outer Van Allen belts, reentrant electrons and protons, and cosmic rays as energetic as a few tens of MeV/nucleon.
