A new concept of a high-energy space-based cosmic ray telescope

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel space-based cosmic ray telescope design that organizes detector elements in bars along three axes, aiming to optimize area, mass, and sampling efficiency for high-energy cosmic ray detection.

Contribution

It introduces a new detector organization concept for space telescopes that balances collecting area and power constraints, supported by Geant4 simulation evaluation.

Findings

The proposed design maintains good event shower sampling.

Simulation results support the feasibility of the concept.

The design potentially improves high-energy cosmic ray detection efficiency.

Abstract

Cosmic ray science has proved to be a very active field, with several important results from recent space-based instruments. Next generation experiments will explore the multi-TeV energy range, trying to cope with the mass and power budget constraints of artificial satellites that limits the collecting area thus reducing the available statistics at the highest energy. With the aim to improve the compromise between area and mass, we propose a new concept for a cosmic-ray telescope in which the detector elements are organized in bars along the 3 axis. In this way we can also maintain a good event shower sampling (for direction and energy reconstruction) and a relatively small number of channels (required power) as the detector size increases. A possible implementation of the concept is also evaluated with a Geant4 simulation.