Current Status of the HERD Space Mission Design

Abstract

HERD (High Energy Radiation Detector) is a future experiment for space-based detection of cosmic rays and gamma ray astronomy onboard the Chinese Space Station. Its most innovative feature will be the event collection from 5 sides, and with its large size it will result in a one-order-of-magnitude jump in acceptance with respect to current largest calorimetric experiments. This will make possible to investigate cosmic ray spectra for each species up to the so-called knee region at PeV energies. The all-electron spectrum will be also measured up to about 10 TeV (depending on the actual flux) and the gamma sky will be studied with a large effective area from a few hundreds MeV up to few TeV, also allowing for the search for possible signatures from dark matter particles in our galaxy.