ALTEA: The instrument calibration

The ALTEA program is an international and multi-disciplinary project aimed at studying particle radiation in space environment and its effects on astronauts' brain functions, as the anomalous perception of light flashes first reported during Apollo missions. The ALTEA space facility includes a 6-silicon telescopes particle detector, and is onboard the International Space Station (ISS) since July 2006. In this paper, the detector calibration at the heavy-ion synchrotron SIS18 at GSI Darmstadt will be presented and compared to the Geant 3 Monte Carlo simulation. Finally, the results of a neural network analysis that was used for ion discrimination on fragmentation data will also be presented. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.