SIDERALE plus BIT: a small stratospheric balloon CZT based experiment at Polar Latitudes
Abstract
SIDERALE was a small experiment hosted as a piggy back payload on the SoRa LDB (Sounding Radar Long Distance Balloon) stratospheric balloon mission by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The balloon was launched on July 1st from Longyearbyen, Svalbard (Norway), and flew for 4 days at a float altitude of about 39 km along the 78 North parallel and landed on the Baffin Island (Canada) on July 4th at 10:30 UTC. SIDERALE was aimed to test in a pseudo spatial environment a detector for high energy astrophysics applications based on a 44 pixel CZT solid state sensor. An onboard data handling computer, a mass memory and a power supply units were integrated in the SIDERALE payload. Furthermore an innovative modular and low cost telemetry system BIT (Bidirectional Iridium Telemetry), developed in a collaboration between INAF/IASF-Bologna and LEN srl, was used in order to make SIDERALE autonomous and independent from the hosting payload. The detector was measuring X and ray radiation for the whole flight according to dynamically set operating modes. Four to six events per second were measured by the sensitive detector volume in an energy range of between 40 keV and 400 keV. Acquired data were 100The overall payload (SIDERALE+BIT) was successfully recovered together with the onboard stored data and arrived back to Italy in autumn 2009. The paper presents the experiment and its main characteristics together with a preliminary analysis of flight and scientific data.
- Publication:
-
38th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010cosp...38.4073C