EUSO-SPB1 Mission and Science

Abstract

The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon 1 (EUSO-SPB1) was launched in 2017 April from Wanaka, New Zealand. The plan of this mission of opportunity on a NASA super pressure balloon test flight was to circle the southern hemisphere. The primary scientific goal was to make the first observations of ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray extensive air showers (EASs) by looking down on the atmosphere with an ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence telescope from suborbital altitude (33~km). After 12~days and 4~hours aloft, the flight was terminated prematurely in the Pacific Ocean. Before the flight, the instrument was tested extensively in the West Desert of Utah, USA, with UV point sources and lasers. The test results indicated that the instrument had sensitivity to EASs of approximately 3 EeV. Simulations of the telescope system, telescope on time, and realized flight trajectory predicted an observation of about 1 event assuming clear sky conditions. The effects of high clouds were estimated to reduce this value by approximately a factor of 2. A manual search and a machine-learning-based search did not find any EAS signals in these data. Here we review the EUSO-SPB1 instrument and flight and the EAS search.

arXiv comment18 pages, 19 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Science and mission status of EUSO-SPB2
• Development of a cosmic ray oriented trigger for the fluorescence telescope on EUSO-SPB2
• Characterization of Hamamatsu 64-channel TSV SiPMs
• The EUSO-SPB2 Fluorescence Telescope for the Detection of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Developments and results in the context of the JEM-EUSO program obtained with the ESAF Simulation and Analysis Framework
• POEMMA-Balloon with Radio: A multi-messenger, multi-detector balloon payload