• Preliminary results of centroiding experiment for the STEP mission

    分类: 地球科学 >> 空间物理学 提交时间: 2016-05-12

    摘要: Search for Terrestrial Exo-Planet (STEP)[1] was originally proposed in 2013 by the National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is currently being under background engineering study phase in China. The STEP mission is a space astrometry telescope working at visible light wavelengths. The STEP aims at the nearby terrestrial planets detection through micro-arcsecond-level astrometry. Determination of the separation between star images on a detector with high precision is very important for astrometric exoplanets detection through the observation of star wobbles due to planets. The requirement of centroiding accuracy for STEP is 1e-5 pixel. A centroiding experiment have been carried out on a metrology testbed in open laboratory. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of determining the separations between star images. Without calibration of pixel positions and intra-pixel response, we have demonstrated that the standard deviation of differential centroiding is below 7.4e-3 pixel by the algorithm of linear corrected photon weighted means(LCPWM)[2,3]. For comparison, the photon weighted means(PWM) and Gauss fitting are also used in the data reduction. These results pave the way for the geometrical calibration and the intra-pixel quantum efficiency(QE) calibration of detector array equipment for micro-pixel accuracy centroiding.

  • Development of Yangbajing air shower core detector array for a new EAS hybrid experiment

    分类: 物理学 >> 核物理学 提交时间: 2016-09-13

    摘要: Aiming at the observation of cosmic-ray chemical composition at the "knee" energy region, we have been developinga new type air-shower core detector (YAC, Yangbajing Air shower Core detector array) to be set up at Yangbajing (90.522∘ E, 30.102∘ N, 4300 m above sea level, atmospheric depth: 606 g/m2) in Tibet, China. YAC works together with the Tibet air-shower array (Tibet-III) and an underground water cherenkov muon detector array (MD) as a hybrid experiment. Each YAC detector unit consists of lead plates of 3.5 cm thick and a scintillation counter which detects the burst size induced by high energy particles in the air-shower cores. The burst size can be measured from 1 MIP (Minimum Ionization Particle) to 106 MIPs. The first phase of this experiment, named "YAC-I", consists of 16 YAC detectors each having the size 40 cm × 50 cm and distributing in a grid with an effective area of 10 m2. YAC-I is used to check hadronic interaction models. The second phase of the experiment, called "YAC-II", consists of 124 YAC detectors with coverage about 500 m2. The inner 100 detectors of 80 cm × 50 cm each are deployed in a 10 × 10 matrix from with a 1.9 m separation and the outer 24 detectors of 100 cm × 50 cm each are distributed around them to reject non-core events whose shower cores are far from the YAC-II array. YAC-II is used to study the primary cosmic-ray composition, in particular, to obtain the energy spectra of proton, helium and iron nuclei between 5×1013 eV and 1016 eV covering the "knee" and also being connected with direct observations at energies around 100 TeV. We present the design and performance of YAC-II in this paper.