Control and data acquisition software of the high‐energy particle detector on board the China Seismo‐Electromagnetic Satellite space mission

Abstract

The China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES) space mission-also known as Limadou in Italian-is a scientific collaboration between China and Italy that aims to investigate the structure and dynamics of the iono/magnetosphere, and in particular to study the possible correlation of perturbations to the occurrence of high-magnitude seismic events. The Chinese satellite houses the Italian high-energy particle detector (HEPD), an apparatus composed of a silicon tracker and a calorimeter system, which detects electrons and protons in the energy ranges 3-100 and 30-200 MeV, respectively. The satellite was launched on February 2, 2018; after a commissioning phase dedicated to the setting of an optimal configuration, HEPD is fully operational since July 28, 2018. After a general overview of the CSES-Limadou mission, this article presents the structure of the HEPD apparatus and describes the design and implementation of the software for the embedded computer system that is responsible for HEPD management. The onboard software runs on the digital signal processors of two electronic boards (CPU and data acquisition), monitors system status, handles instrument data acquisition, performs periodic calibration of the subdetectors, performs

Time Dependence of 50–250 MeV Galactic Cosmic-Ray Protons between Solar Cycles 24 and 25, Measured by the High-energy Particle Detector on board the CSES-01 Satellite

“…The HEPD-01 capabilities for galactic and trapped protons and space weather studies have already been assessed in Bartocci et al (2020), Martucci et al (2022), Palma et al 2021, andin Piersanti et al (2022). More technical details on the mission and the instrument itself can be found in previous publications (Picozza et al 2019;Ambrosi et al 2020;Sotgiu et al 2020;Ambrosi et al 2021).…”

A Critical Review of Ground Based Observations of Earthquake Precursors

“…Between the other national communities of scientists that set the standard at the beginning of this century we can cite: Italy (Biagi et al, 2001a, Tramutoli et al, 2005Sgrigna et al, 2007;Sgrigna and Conti, 2012); France (Zlotnicki and Cornet, 1986;Parrot et al, 1993, Parrot, 995); Japan (Hattori, 2004Uyeda et al, 2009a;Uyeda et al, 2009b); URSS-Russia (Chirkov, 2004;Kotsarenko et al, 2005;Morozov, 2006;Namgaladze et al, 2009) with several observations have been carried out for example in Kamchatka area (Vershinin et al, 1999); etc. In this framework, several space projects have been proposed and developed such as DEMETER (Parrot, 2002), QuakeSat (Flagg et al, 2004), ESPERIA (Sgrigna et al, 2008a;Sgrigna et al, 2008b), VULKAN (Kuznetsov et al, 2011), CSES (Shen et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2018;Yan et al, 2018;Li et al, 2020;Sotgiu et al, 2021) and FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 (Lin et al, 2020). The Earth remote sensing is the new frontier of seismoelectromagnetic investigation because it allows monitoring several regions worldwide that is a key ingredient for statistical studies including several seismic events occurring in different tectonic systems and geomagnetic conditions.…”

Looking for Earthquake Precursors From Space: A Critical Review

“…In this framework, the CSES satellite is the second mission designed for investigating seismo-associated phenomena from space, which has successfully been launched on February 2018. CSES payload includes nine instruments: a particle detector from China constituted by three sub-units [the HEPP-L, -H and -X detectors (Li M. et al, 2019) for measuring low-and highenergy charged particles and X rays]; the Italian HEPD highenergy particle detector (Alfonsi et al, 2017;Ambrosi et al, 2018Ambrosi et al, , 2020Picozza et al, 2019;Bartocci et al, 2020;Sotgiu et al, 2021); two magnetometers [HPM (Cheng et al, 2018) for low and SCM (Cao et al, 2018) for high frequencies respectively]; the EFD detector (Huang et al, 2018) (for measuring electric field components); a Langmuir probe (LAP) (Yan et al, 2018a;Liu et al, 2019) and a plasma detector PAP (Liu et al, 2019b); a three bands beacon transmitter and a occultation receiver (Chen et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2018). After two years of data acquisitions, the temporal series starts to be enough long to allow carrying out statistical studies.…”