Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 6: Astrophysics

EP 6.5: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 23. März 2022, 12:15–12:30, EP-H1

ComPol's way to space - preparing a CubeSat Compton Telescope for its in orbit verification (IOV) at the ISS — •Katrin Geigenberger for the ComPol collaboration — Max-Planck Institute for Physics (MPP), Munich, Germany — Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany

ComPol will be a 3U-CubeSat with a Compton polarimeter consisting of a Silicon Drift Detector and a CeBr3 calorimeter. It will perform a long-term measurement of Cygnus X-1 in the hard X-ray range. The goal is to determine the polarization between 20 and 300 keV - a region where the polarization of Cygnus X-1 was hardly observed before. This talk is about the steps towards the first big milestone: a scaled-down version of ComPol's future instrumentation will be operated along with essential parts of the CubeSat bus on an external platform aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This IOV-mission will be a first real life demonstration of the detector system in space environment (background radiation, thermal loads and vacuum). The goal is to receive and process coincident signals from both detectors and to determine the influence of solar, x-ray, and cosmic radiation backgrounds. An overview of the current status of both mechanical and electrical hardware for the very first ComPol prototype will be given with focus on the space-mission specific challenges: e.g. shortage of room, protection of the sensitive detectors from solar radiation, constraints due to vacuum, and the investigation of the behavior at launch loads. This research was supported by the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).