LIDAL, a Time-of-Flight Radiation Detector for the International Space Station: Description and Ground Calibration.

LIDAL (Light Ion Detector for ALTEA, Anomalous Long-Term Effects on Astronauts) is a radiation detector designed to measure the flux, the energy spectra and, for the first time, the time-of-flight of ions in a space habitat. It features a combination of striped silicon sensors for the measurement of deposited energy (using the ALTEA device, which operated from 2006 to 2012 in the International Space Station) and fast scintillators for the time-of-flight measurement. LIDAL was tested and calibrated using the proton beam line at TIFPA (Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics Application) and the carbon beam line at CNAO (National Center for Oncology Hadron-therapy) in 2019.

Measuring Changes in the Atmospheric Neutrino Rate over Gigayear Timescales.

Measuring the cosmic ray flux over timescales comparable to the age of the Solar System, ∼4.5  Gyr, could provide a new window on the history of the Earth, the Solar System, and even our Galaxy. We present a technique to indirectly measure the rate of cosmic rays as a function of time using the imprints of atmospheric neutrinos in "paleo-detectors," natural minerals that record damage tracks from nuclear recoils.