A simulation code to assist designing space missions of the Airwatch type

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible simulation code designed to optimize the design parameters of Airwatch-type space missions by modeling cosmic ray interactions, atmospheric effects, and detector responses to maximize detection efficiency within mission constraints.

Contribution

The paper presents a new simulation tool that integrates cosmic ray spectra, atmospheric modeling, and detector response to aid in designing space missions of the Airwatch type.

Findings

Preliminary results demonstrate the code's ability to simulate signals across different energies and incident angles.

The simulation helps optimize parameters like orbit height and detector size for better mission performance.

The code balances detection rates with mission cost, weight, and power constraints.

Abstract

The design of an Airwatch type space mission can greatly benefit from a flexible simulation code for establishing the values of the main parameters of the experiment. We present here a code written for this purpose. The cosmic ray primary spectrum at very high energies, the atmosphere modelling, the fluorescence yield, the photon propagation and the detector response are taken into account in order to optimize the fundamental design parameters of the experiment, namely orbit height, field of view, mirror radius, number of pixels of the focal plane, threshold of photo-detection. The optimization criterion will be to maximize counting rates versus mission cost, which imposes limits both on weight and power consumption. Preliminary results on signals with changing energy and zenith angle of incident particles are shown.