Volume 395 - 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2021) - CRI - Cosmic Ray Indirect
Estimation of the exposure of the TUS space-based cosmic ray observatory
F. Fenu*, K. Shinozaki, M. Zotov, M.E. Bertaina, A. Castellina, A. Cellino and P. Klimov
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: July 07, 2021
Published on:
Abstract
The TUS observatory was the first orbital detector aimed at the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs).
It was launched on April 28, 2016, from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia and operated until December 2017. It collected $\sim80,000$ events with a time resolution of 0.8~$\mu$s. A fundamental parameter to be determined for cosmic ray studies is the exposure of an experiment. This parameter is important to estimate the average expected event rate as a function of energy and to calculate the absolute flux in case of event detection. Here we present results of a study aimed to calculate the exposure that TUS accumulated during its mission. The role of clouds, detector dead time, artificial sources, storms, lightning discharges, airglow and moon phases is studied in detail. An exposure estimate with its geographical distribution is presented. We report on the applied technique and on the perspectives of this study in view of the future missions of the JEM-EUSO program.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.395.0333
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access