Issue |
J. Space Weather Space Clim.
Volume 7, 2017
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A18 | |
Number of page(s) | 11 | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/swsc/2017016 | |
Published online | 01 August 2017 |
Research Article
Exploiting different active silicon detectors in the International Space Station: ALTEA and DOSTEL galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) measurements
1
Department of Physics, University of Rome Tor Vergata & INFN – Roma 2, 00133
Rome, Italy
2
German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Linder Höhe, 51147
Köln, Germany
3
Christian Albrechts Universität zu Kiel (CAU), Christian-Albrechts-Platz, 24118
Kiel, Germany
* Corresponding author: narici@roma2.infn.it
Received:
6
April
2017
Accepted:
19
June
2017
The solar system exploration by humans requires to successfully deal with the radiation exposition issue. The scientific aspect of this issue is twofold: knowing the radiation environment the astronauts are going to face and linking radiation exposure to health risks. Here we focus on the first issue. It is generally agreed that the final tool to describe the radiation environment in a space habitat will be a model featuring the needed amount of details to perform a meaningful risk assessment. The model should also take into account the shield changes due to the movement of materials inside the habitat, which in turn produce changes in the radiation environment. This model will have to undergo a final validation with a radiation field of similar complexity. The International Space Station (ISS) is a space habitat that features a radiation environment inside which is similar to what will be found in habitats in deep space, if we use measurements acquired only during high latitude passages (where the effects of the Earth magnetic field are reduced). Active detectors, providing time information, that can easily select data from different orbital sections, are the ones best fulfilling the requirements for these kinds of measurements. The exploitation of the radiation measurements performed in the ISS by all the available instruments is therefore mandatory to provide the largest possible database to the scientific community, to be merged with detailed Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, in the quest for a full model validation. While some efforts in comparing results from multiple active detectors have been attempted, a thorough study of a procedure to merge data in a single data matrix in order to provide the best validation set for radiation environment models has never been attempted. The aim of this paper is to provide such a procedure, to apply it to two of the most performing active detector systems in the ISS: the Anomalous Long Term Effects in Astronauts (ALTEA) instrument and the DOSimetry TELescope (DOSTEL) detectors, applied in the frame of the DOSIS and DOSIS 3D project onboard the ISS and to present combined results exploiting the features of each of the two apparatuses.
Key words: International space station / ALTEA / DOSTEL / Galactic cosmic radiation / Space radiation measurements
© L. Narici et al., Published by EDP Sciences 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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