[en] Commercial off-the-shelf components can be successfully used in scientific payloads installed in spacecraft flying on Low Earth Orbits (LEO). Several experiments (AMS01, NINA) have already used these components, some others are planning to use them (AMS02, PAMELA and GLAST). In order to establish the reliability of these components careful tests need to be performed according to space qualification rules. There are two main types of possible damage that needs to be tested: the total dose damage and the single event effects (SEE). In this paper we will describe the physical cause of both the effects, explain how to conduct a test according to ESA/SSC standard rules and give some examples of components that have been tested by the AMS collaboration

[en] The AMS-02 Tracker power supply system, described in this paper, has been designed optimizing noise performances, modularity and efficiency. The power is distributed starting from a 28V line coming from the power distribution system is converted into the needed voltages by means of DC-DC converters, and for bias supply and front-end voltages is post-regulated by means of linear regulators. Components Off The Shelf (COTS) have been extensively used in the construction of this power supply, however various radiation test campaigns have been performed in order to verify the reliability of these components. The power supply architecture developed for the tracker detector has been used as a guideline for the development of the power supplies for the other detectors in the experiment

[en] The SuperB project is an asymmetric e⁺e⁻ accelerator of 10³⁶ cm⁻²s⁻¹ luminosity, capable of collecting a 50–75 ab⁻¹ data sample in five years of running. The SuperB electromagnetic calorimeter (EMC) provides energy and direction measurement of photons and electrons and identification versus other charged particles for electrons. A matrix of 25 LYSO crystals has been tested at the Beam Test Facility at Frascati in May 2011 at energies between 100 MeV and 500 MeV. Results from this test will be presented. Design and Monte Carlo studies for the general EMC system will also be presented.

[en] The SuperB project is an asymmetric e⁺e⁻ accelerator of 10³⁶cm⁻²s⁻¹ design luminosity, capable of collecting a data sample of 50–75ab⁻¹ in five years running. The SuperB electromagnetic calorimeter (EMC) provides energy and direction measurement of photons and electrons, and is used for identification of electrons versus other charged particles. In particular we present its design, geometry study and related simulations, as well as R and D on LYSO crystals and developments on readout electronics. A matrix of 25 crystals has been tested at the Beam Test Facility of Frascati (BTF) in May 2011 at energies between 200 MeV and 500 MeV. Results from this test are presented

[en] Pixel sensors have been calibrated using both fluorescence X-ray photons and an X-ray beam obtained by the transmission technique. The X-rays were generated by an Amptek EDIX 40 X-ray tube (maximum voltage 40 kV). During the fluorescence calibration the pixel sensor was placed in front of the target in an off-beam position; the resulting photons hitting the detector were emitted by fluorescence in all directions with an energy which is typical of the fluorescence lines of the target material. During the calibration in the transmission mode the detector was placed behind the target, acting now as a filter, and the energy of the photons was tuned by adjusting the voltage of the tube and the thickness of the target. In this paper the comparison between the two methods will be shown. From the results of this test, it is possible to infer that transmission is more efficient (higher photon yield) and flexible (more energy points are possible) but produces broader spectral lines while fluorescence has a better energy definition. A reasonable strategy to benefit from both methods is using fluorescence to calibrate a spectrometer that will be used to evaluate the energy of the X-rays emitted in the transmission mode. The results of this calibration will be shown in this paper

[en] This article describes the performance and the architecture of the power supply system for the Tracker detector in the AMS-02 experiment. Qualification tests results on assembled crates will be also presented. The AMS-02 experiment will be installed in the International Space Station (ISS); it will measure the cosmic ray spectrum from 0.5 GeV up to several TeV looking for anti-matter, dark matter and strange quark matter. A preliminary version of the experiment has successfully flown in 1998 on the STS-91 space shuttle flight. The power supply system for the Tracker detector was used as a guideline for the other power supply systems in the experiment

[en] The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a large acceptance (0.65 sr m²) detector designed to operate in the International Space Station (ISS) for three years. The purposes of the experiment are to search for cosmic antimatter and dark matter and to study the composition and energy spectrum of the primary cosmic rays. A 'scaled-down' version has been flown on the Space Shuttle Discovery for 10 days in June 1998. The complete AMS is programmed for installation on the ISS in October 2003 for an operational period of 3 yr. This contribution reports on the experimental configuration that will be installed on the ISS