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PAMELA In Space

Good news out of Russia; the PAMELA experiment was successfully launched from the Baikonur space base in Kazakhstan yesterday on a Russian launch vehicle. PAMELA is a cosmic ray expermient being hosted on the Resurs-DK1 satellite (a seperate mission to monitor the sea surface status, the ice situation and meteorology of the Earth's polar regions). With a minimum design life of three years in orbit, PAMELA will obtain vastly better data on cosmic rays than current techniques using balloons or short lived (2 day) space shuttle missions. While most cosmic rays are very high energy protons and nuclei, a small portion are antiprotons and antielectrons and PAMELA will be able to detect about 1,000 times as many of these as in balloon experiements.

The PAMELA detector is a 470kg spectrometer which can determine the momentum and charge of incoming cosmic rays by measuring the curve of the particle tracks as they are deflected by strong magnets. The spectrometer tracks alone are not enough to identify the type of particle; a calorimeter is also necessary. The calorimeter, which measures particle energy, can also result in a shower of secondary particles and it is by studying these that the researchers will identify the anti-particles (the secondary showers are different for regular protons than antiprotons). This is a good time to be in space looking for cosmic rays as the solar cycle will be at a minimum in 2008 which reduces interference from particles in the solar wind.

The hope for the detector is to measure the first traces of 'dark matter'. Some field theory models, known as 'supersymmetric theories', predict that dark matter are particles called neutralinos. The neutralinos can self-annihilate which results in positron and antiproton cosmic rays at specific energies which PAMELA is able to detect. In additional, some astronomers predict the possibility of antigalaxies made of antimatter which may be detected as jets of antihelium and anticarbon nuclei incident on the PAMELA detector. At a small cost of Euro 21M, PAMELA is poised to greatly enhance our knowledge of cosmic rays and provide first evidence of a new class of matter and validate some very esoteric high energy particle theories.

PAMELA is a collaboration between Russia, Italy, Germany and Sweden and is led by Piergiorgio Picozza of the University of Rome. More detailed information is availabe from an 8 page paper authored by Picozza and Morselli available at the LANL archive.
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