Measuring Cosmic Rays at different altitude ranges with Compact Scintillator Array Detector

Chih-Yun Chen^1*, Yi Yang¹

¹Physics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chih-Yun Chen, email:nana199685@gmail.com

Measuring the properties of cosmic rays provides lots of valuable information of understanding the nature of our Universe. There are many experiments dedicated for measuring cosmic rays on Earth or in space, but there is a large gap in altitude between the balloon and low Earth orbit satellite missions. Hence, we developed a small cosmic ray detector based on scintillator and SiPM technology, so called Compact Scintillator Array Detector (ComSAD) for a sounding rocket mission.
ComSAD is design to measure the cosmic ray to cover the altitude gap from 30 km to 200 km and to be the engineering model for the future CubeSat missions. Small size of ComSAD make it portable and flexible to measure cosmic rays. To gain more data and understand the performance of ComSAD, we cooperate with Aerospace Industrial Development Corp. (AIDC) using their flight, ASTRA, which can fly up to 43000 feet. Therefore, we modified the whole payload with ComSAD to let it acquire the data when the mission is executed and ensure the payload can be turned off safely and automatically when the batteries run out of power.
In this talk, we will present the design, idea, and performance of ComSAD on ASTRA and the future development.

Keywords: Cosmic Rays, Detector, Scintillator