AGILE: Development of a Compact, Low-Power, Low-Cost, and On-Board Detector for Ion Identification and Energy Measurement

Florian Gautier

doi:10.3390/instruments6010016

Abstract

An AGILE (Advanced enerGetic Ion eLectron tElescope) instrument is being developed at the University of Kansas and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to be launched on board a CubeSat in 2022. The AGILE instrument aims to identify a large variety of ions (H-Fe) in a wide energy range (1–100 MeV/nucl) in real-time using fast silicon detectors and fast read-out electronics. This can be achieved by the first use of real-time Pulse Shape Discrimination in space instrumentation. This method of discrimination relies on specific amplitude and time characteristics of the signals sampled every 100 ps and produced by ions that stop in the detector medium. AGILE will be able to observe, in situ, the fluxes of a large variety of particles in a wide energy range to advance our knowledge of the fundamental processes in the universe. This work presents the current stage of development of the instrument, the discrimination method used through the performed simulations, and the first results from lab tests using an Am-241 source.

Highlights

The development of robust particle detectors is a major interest of space research in order to probe the processes leading to the creation, transport, and loss of charged particles in the solar system [1]
Simulations allowed the development of a specific identification method for AGILE by applying Pulse Shape Discrimination on the signal output of each layer
AGILE will occupy 1 unit of the GENSAT-1 CubeSat with the flight scheduled for 2022 (Figure 9). This initial version of the telescope will employ a stack of three layers of fast Si detectors to provide the first use of real-time Pulse Shape Discrimination techniques in space

Summary

Introduction

The development of robust particle detectors is a major interest of space research in order to probe the processes leading to the creation, transport, and loss of charged particles in the solar system [1]. Both the energy measurement and the identification of the particles species are a requirement for the development of such detectors. The AGILE (Advanced enerGetic Ion eLectron tElescope) instrument is developed as a new-generation space instrument to provide a compact, lowmass, low-power, and low-cost particle detector. AGILE aims at identifying ions (H to Fe) and electrons and measuring their energy in a wide range of 1–100 MeV per nucleon and 1–10 MeV, respectively. AGILE will be the first space-particle detector to perform real-time discrimination using the Pulse Shape Discrimination (PSD) technique [4]

Methods

Results

Conclusion