Spaceship Earth (detector)

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Spaceship Earth is a network of neutron monitors designed to measure the flux of cosmic rays arriving at Earth from different directions. [1] All the 12 member neutron monitor stations are located at high (Northern or Southern) latitude, which makes their detecting directions more precise, and their energy responses uniform. Their combined signals provide a real-time measurement of the three-dimensional distribution of cosmic rays, mainly galactic cosmic rays as well as solar energetic particles during the most intense solar events. Analyses of these data have applications in space weather studies.

A neutron monitor is a ground-based detector designed to measure the number of high-energy charged particles striking the Earth's atmosphere from outer space. For historical reasons the incoming particles are called "cosmic rays", but in fact they are particles, predominantly protons and Helium nuclei. Most of the time, a neutron monitor records galactic cosmic rays and their variation with the 11-year sunspot cycle and 22-year magnetic cycle. Occasionally the Sun emits cosmic rays of sufficient energy and intensity to raise radiation levels on Earth's surface to the degree that they are readily detected by neutron monitors. They are termed "ground level enhancements" (GLE).

Cosmic ray High-energy particle, mainly originating outside the Solar system

Cosmic rays are high-energy radiation, mainly originating outside the Solar System and even from distant galaxies. Upon impact with the Earth's atmosphere, cosmic rays can produce showers of secondary particles that sometimes reach the surface. Composed primarily of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei, they are originated either from the sun or from outside of our solar system. Data from the Fermi Space Telescope (2013) have been interpreted as evidence that a significant fraction of primary cosmic rays originate from the supernova explosions of stars. Active galactic nuclei also appear to produce cosmic rays, based on observations of neutrinos and gamma rays from blazar TXS 0506+056 in 2018.

Space weather

Space weather is a branch of space physics and aeronomy, or heliophysics, concerned with the time varying conditions within the Solar System, including the solar wind, emphasizing the space surrounding the Earth, including conditions in the magnetosphere, ionosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Space weather is distinct from but conceptually related to the terrestrial weather of the atmosphere of Earth. The term space weather was first used in the 1950s and came into common usage in the 1990s. Similar to terrestrial climatology, the long term patterns of space weather comprise space climate.

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Locations

Spaceship Earth is a multinational collaboration, with participating institutions from the United States of America, Russia, Canada, and Australia.

University of Delaware American university

The University of Delaware is a public research university located in Newark, Delaware. University of Delaware is the largest university in Delaware. UD currently offers more than 135 undergraduate degrees. At the graduate level, it offers 67 doctoral, 142 master’s degree programs, 14 dual degrees, 15 interdisciplinary programs, 12 on-line programs, and 28 certificate programs across its seven colleges and more than 82 research centers and institutes. UD is one of the top 100 institutions for federal obligations in science and engineering and interdisciplinary initiatives in energy science and policy, the environment, and in human health. The main campus is in Newark, with satellite campuses in Dover, Wilmington, Lewes, and Georgetown. It is considered a large institution with approximately 18,500 undergraduate and 4,500 graduate students. UD is a privately governed university which receives public funding for being a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant and urban-grant state-supported research institution.

McMurdo Station Antarctic base in the United States

The McMurdo Station is a United States Antarctic research center on the south tip of Ross Island, which is in the New Zealand-claimed Ross Dependency on the shore of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. It is operated by the United States through the United States Antarctic Program, a branch of the National Science Foundation. The station is the largest community in Antarctica, capable of supporting up to 1,258 residents, and serves as one of three United States Antarctic science facilities. All personnel and cargo going to or coming from Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station first pass through McMurdo.

Qaanaaq Place in Greenland, Kingdom of Denmark

Qaanaaq, formerly and still popularly known as Thule or New Thule, is the main town in the northern part of the Avannaata municipality in northwestern Greenland. It is one of the northernmost towns in the world. The inhabitants of Qaanaaq speak Kalaallisut and Danish, and many also speak the Inuktun language. The town has a population of 656 as of 2013.

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Neutrino astronomy observational astronomy that benefits from the direct, or indirect, detection of neutrinos

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Advanced Composition Explorer NASA scientific satellite

Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) is a NASA Explorers program Solar and space exploration mission to study matter comprising energetic particles from the solar wind, the interplanetary medium, and other sources.

Haleakala Observatory

The Haleakalā Observatory, also known as the Haleakalā High Altitude Observatory Site, is Hawaii's first astronomical research observatory. It is located on the island of Maui and is owned by the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawai'i, which operates some of the facilities on the site and leases portions to other organizations. Tenants include the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN). At over 3,050 meters (10,010 ft) in altitude, the summit of Haleakalā is above one third of the Earths's troposphere and has excellent astronomical seeing conditions.

Pierre Auger Observatory observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory is an international cosmic ray observatory in Argentina designed to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays: sub-atomic particles traveling nearly at the speed of light and each with energies beyond 1018 eV. In Earth's atmosphere such particles interact with air nuclei and produce various other particles. These effect particles (called an "air shower") can be detected and measured. But since these high energy particles have an estimated arrival rate of just 1 per km2 per century, the Auger Observatory has created a detection area of 3,000 km2 (1,200 sq mi)—the size of Rhode Island, or Luxembourg—in order to record a large number of these events. It is located in the western Mendoza Province, Argentina, near the Andes.

PAMELA detector

PAMELA was a cosmic ray research module attached to an Earth orbiting satellite. PAMELA was launched on 15 June 2006 and was the first satellite-based experiment dedicated to the detection of cosmic rays, with a particular focus on their antimatter component, in the form of positrons and antiprotons. Other objectives included long-term monitoring of the solar modulation of cosmic rays, measurements of energetic particles from the Sun, high-energy particles in Earth's magnetosphere and Jovian electrons. It was also hoped that it may detect evidence of dark matter annihilation. PAMELA operations were terminated in 2016, as were the operations of the host-satellite Resurs-DK1.

A Forbush decrease is a rapid decrease in the observed galactic cosmic ray intensity following a coronal mass ejection (CME). It occurs due to the magnetic field of the plasma solar wind sweeping some of the galactic cosmic rays away from Earth. The term Forbush decrease was named after the American physicist Scott E. Forbush, who studied cosmic rays in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Russian Space Research Institute is the leading organization of the Russian Academy of Sciences on space exploration to benefit fundamental science. It was formerly known as the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

GRAPES-3

The GRAPES-3 experiment located at Ooty in India started as a collaboration of the Indian Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Japanese Osaka City University, and now also includes the Japanese Nagoya Women's University.

Martin Arthur Pomerantz was an American physicist who served as Director of the Bartol Research Institute and who had been a leader in developing Antarctic astronomy. When the astronomical observatory at the United States Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was opened in 1995, it was named the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO) in his honor. Pomerantz published his scientific autobiography, Astronomy on Ice, in 2004.

Spaceship Earth may refer to:

Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter calorimeter

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A strangelet is a hypothetical particle consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. An equivalent description is that a strangelet is a small fragment of strange matter, small enough to be considered a particle. The size of an object composed of strange matter could, theoretically, range from a few femtometers across to arbitrarily large. Once the size becomes macroscopic, such an object is usually called a strange star. The term "strangelet" originates with Edward Farhi and R. L. Jaffe. Strangelets have been suggested as a dark matter candidate.

John Alexander Simpson American physicist

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Wilson Marcy Powell was an American physicist and a member of the Physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ashot Chilingarian Armenian physicist

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References

  1. Bieber, John W.; et al. (2004). "Spaceship Earth Observations of the Easter 2001 Solar Particle Event" (PDF). The Astrophysical Journal. 601 (1): L103–L106. Bibcode:2004ApJ...601L.103B. doi:10.1086/381801.