Time profile of cosmic radiation exposure during the EXPOSE-E mission: the R3DE instrument

• Published in: Astrobiology Vol. 12; no. 5; p. 403
• Main Authors: Dachev, Tsvetan, Horneck, Gerda, Häder, Donat-Peter, Schuster, Martin, Richter, Peter, Lebert, Michael, Demets, Rene
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.05.2012
• Subjects: Cosmic Radiation; Protons; Radiation Monitoring - instrumentation; Radiation Monitoring - methods; Radiometry - instrumentation; Space Flight; Spacecraft
• ISSN: 1557-8070
• DOI: 10.1089/ast.2011.0759

The aim of this paper is to present the time profile of cosmic radiation exposure obtained by the Radiation Risk Radiometer-Dosimeter during the EXPOSE-E mission in the European Technology Exposure Facility on the International Space Station's Columbus module. Another aim is to make the obtained results available to other EXPOSE-E teams for use in their data analysis. Radiation Risk Radiometer-Dosimeter is a low-mass and small-dimension automatic device that measures solar radiation in four channels and cosmic ionizing radiation as well. The main results of the present study include the following: (1) three different radiation sources were detected and quantified-galactic cosmic rays (GCR), energetic protons from the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region of the inner radiation belt, and energetic electrons from the outer radiation belt (ORB); (2) the highest daily averaged absorbed dose rate of 426 μGy d(-1) came from SAA protons; (3) GCR delivered a much smaller daily absorbed dose rate of 91.1 μGy d(-1), and the ORB source delivered only 8.6 μGy d(-1). The analysis of the UV and temperature data is a subject of another article (Schuster et al., 2012 ).