Solar Neutron and Gamma-ray Monitor on the ChubuSat-2 Satellite

抄録

The ChubuSat is a Japanese microsatellite technology demonstration mission jointly depeloped by Nagoya university, Daido university, and medium or small-sized aerospace industrial companies in the Chubu area of central Japan. ChubuSat-2 is the second ChubuSat following ChubuSat-1 which was launched by the Russian DNEPR rocket on November 6, 2014. It was selected as one of the four piggyback payloads of the X-ray astronomy satellite ASTRO-H in 2014 summer, and will be launched by the H-IIA rocket from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tanegashima Space Center (TNSC) in winter season of fiscal year (FY) 2015. The ChubuSat-2 mission is devoted to monitoring neutrons and gamma-rays in the ASTRO-H orbit which can be noise sources for ASTRO-H X-ray and soft gamma-ray observations. The mission involves solar neutron observations which were originally proposed by graduate students who joined the leadership development program for space exploration and research, a program for leading graduate schools at Nagoya University. In this paper, we describe the outline of the ChubuSat-2 satellite and the details of the mission instrument, the radiation detector (RD).