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A software system has been developed for the DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) mission, a satellite-based experiment. The DAMPE software is mainly written in C++ and steered using Python script. This article presents an overview of the DAMPE offline software, including the major architecture design and specific implementation for simulation, calibration and reconstruction. The whole system has been successfully applied to DAMPE data analysis, based on which some results from simulation and beam test experiments are obtained and presented.
The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is a space-borne particle detector and cosmic ray observatory in operation since 2015, designed to probe electrons and gamma rays from a few GeV to 10 TeV energy, as well as cosmic protons and nuclei up to 100 TeV. Among the main scientific objectives is the precise measurement of the cosmic electron+positron flux, which due to the very large proton background in orbit requires a powerful particle identification method. In the past decade, the field of machine learning has provided us the needed tools. This paper presents a neural network based approach to cosmic electron identification and proton rejection and showcases its performances based on simulated Monte Carlo data. The neural network reaches significantly lower background than the classical, cut-based method for the same detection efficiency, especially at highest energies. A good matching between simulations and real data completes the picture.
Planetary science space missions need high quality software ed efficient algorithms in order to extract innovative scientific results from flight data. Reliable and efficient software technologies are increasingly vital to improve and prolong the exploiting of the results of a mission, to allow the application of established algorithms and technologies also to future space missions and for the scientific analysis of archived data. Here after will be given an in-depth analysis study accompanied by implementation examples on ESA and ASI missions and some remarkable results fruit of decades of important experience reached by space agencies and research institutes in the field. Space applications software quality analysis is not different from other application contexts, among the hi-tech and hi-reliability fields. We describe here a Software Quality study in general, then we will focus on the quality of space mission software (s/w) with details on some notable cases.
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the currently largest experiment dedicated to unveil the nature and origin of the highest energetic cosmic rays. The software framework Offline has been developed by the Pierre Auger Collaboration for joint analysis of data from different independent detector systems used in one observatory. While reconstruction modules are specific to the Pierre Auger Observatory components of the Offline framework are also used by other experiments. The software framework has recently been extended to incorporate data from the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA), the radio extension of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The reconstruction of the data of such radio detectors requires the repeated evaluation of complex antenna gain patterns which significantly increases the required computing resources in the joint analysis. In this contribution we explore the usability of massive parallelization of parts of the Offline code on the GPU. We present the result of a systematic profiling of the joint analysis of the Offline software framework aiming for the identification of code areas suitable for parallelization on GPUs. Possible strategies and obstacles for the usage of GPGPU in an existing experiment framework are discussed.
The advent of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) necessitates the development of a powerful framework for the analysis of radio measurements of cosmic ray air showers. As AERA performs radio-hybrid measurements of air shower radio emission in coincidence with the surface particle detectors and fluorescence telescopes of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the radio analysis functionality had to be incorporated in the existing hybrid analysis solutions for fluoresence and surface detector data. This goal has been achieved in a natural way by extending the existing Auger Offline software framework with radio functionality. In this article, we lay out the design, highlights and features of the radio extension implemented in the Auger Offline framework. Its functionality has achieved a high degree of sophistication and offers advanced features such as vectorial reconstruction of the electric field, advanced signal processing algorithms, a transparent and efficient handling of FFTs, a very detailed simulation of detector effects, and the read-in of multiple data formats including data from various radio simulation codes. The source code of this radio functionality can be made available to interested parties on request.
An antenna array devoted to the autonomous radio-detection of high energy cosmic rays is being deployed on the site of the 21 cm array radio telescope in XinJiang, China. Thanks in particular to the very good electromagnetic environment of this remote experimental site, self-triggering on extensive air showers induced by cosmic rays has been achieved with a small scale prototype of the foreseen antenna array. We give here a detailed description of the detector and present the first detection of extensive air showers with this prototype.