The Front-End Electronics of the EUSO-BALLOON UV Camera
Abstract
The JEM-EUSO collaboration is currently developing the EUSO-BALLOON instrument, a pathfinder of the JEM-EUSO mission. Such an effort is led by the CNES, the French space agency, and involves several French institutes as well as several key institutes ofthe JEM-EUSO collaboration. The EUSO-Balloon instrument consists of an UV telescope and of an Infrared Camera. The UV telescope will operate at an altitude of 40 km, collecting background and possibly signal photons in the (290-430 nm) fluorescence UV range, the one in which the UV tracks generated by high energetic cosmic rays propagating in the earth's atmosphere are observed. The balloon experiment will be equipped with electronics and acquisition systems, as close as possible to the ones designed for the UV telescope of the main JEM-EUSO instrument. The past year has been devoted to the design, the fabrication and the tests of the prototypes of the optics, of the Photo Detector Module (PDM), of the digital processor and of the JR Camera of the EUSO-Balloon. In this contribution we focus on the PDM, the core element of the JEM-EUSO focal surface. We first describe all key items of the PDM, from the photodetectors to the FPGA board of the first stage of the digital processing. We then report on the tests carried out on the prototypes to assess their functionality and their suitability for a balloon mission.
- Publication:
-
International Cosmic Ray Conference
- Pub Date:
- 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013ICRC...33.2178B
- Keywords:
-
- JEM-EUSO;
- balloon;
- electronic;
- photo-detection