Relativistic electron fluxes and dose rate variations during April–May 2010 geomagnetic disturbances in the R3DR data on ISS

Abstract

Space radiation has been monitored successfully using the Radiation Risks Radiometer-Dosimeter (R3D) installed at the ESA EXPOSE-R (R3DR) facility outside of the Russian Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS) between March 2009 and January 2011. R3DR is a Liulin type spectrometer–dosimeter with a single Si PIN detector 2cm2 of area and 0.3mm thick. The R3DR instrument accumulated about 2 million measurements of the absorbed dose rate and flux of 10s resolution. The total external and internal shielding before the detector of R3DR device is 0.41gcm−2. The calculated stopping energy of normally incident particles to the detector is 0.78MeV for electrons and 15.8MeV for protons. After the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) at 09:54 UTC on 3 April 2010, a shock was observed at the ACE spacecraft at 0756 UTC on 5 April, which led to a sudden impulse on Earth at 08:26 UTC. Nevertheless, while the magnetic substorms on 5 and 6 of April were moderate; the second largest in history of GOES fluence of electrons with energy >2MeV was measured. The R3DR data show a relatively small amount of relativistic electrons on 5 April. The maximum dose rate of 2323μGyday−1 was reached on 7 April; by 9 April, a dose of 6600μGy was accumulated. By the end of the period on 7 May 2010 a total dose of 11,587μGy was absorbed. Our data were compared with AE-8 MIN, CRESS and ESA-SEE1 models using SPENVIS and with similar observations on American, Japanese and Russian satellites.