Time Profile of Cosmic Radiation Exposure During the EXPOSE-E Mission: The R3DE Instrument

• DOI: 10.1089/ast.2011.0759
• Publication Date: 2012-06-08T12:30:49Z
• Authors: Tsvetan Dachev; Gerda Horneck; Donat-Peter Häder; Martin Schuster; Peter Richter; Michael Lebert; Rene Demets
• Keywords: Ionizing radiation; ISS; Space Flight; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy; Radiation Monitoring; 13. Climate action; 0103 physical sciences; Protons; Spacecraft; Radiometry; R3D; Cosmic Radiation

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 ).