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The Chinese-Italian CSES space mission will study the ionospheric perturbations possibly associated with earthquakes – especially with destructive ones - and explore new approaches for short-term and imminent forecast. It will also help finding a new way for theoretical studies on the mechanism of earthquake preparation processes. CSES satellite was launched on the 2nd of February 2018 and inserted into a circular Sun-syncronous orbit with 98 degrees inclination and 500 km altitude. Expected lifetime is 5 years.
CSES hosts several instruments onboard: 2 magnetometers, an electrical field detector, a plasma analyzer, a Langmuir probe and 2 particle detectors. One of them, the High Energy Particle Detector HEPD, was realized by INFN (Italy) under the financing of the Italian Space Agency ASI. The Italian contribution to the CSES mission is called Limadou.
Task of the HEPD is to study particle fluxes of the Earth radiation belts in order to find sudden burst. Previous space missions, indeed, have found time-correlations between particle bursts measured in space and the occurrence of an earthquake on Ground. In addition, HEPD is a very powerful instrument for Space Weather.
HEPD detector measures electrons (3 - 100 MeV) and protons (30 - 200 MeV) along CSES orbit. The angular and energy resolution and the detector acceptance are optimized to accurately detect the expected low short-term time variations of the particle flux from the radiation belts.
Topic of this talk is the description of the CSES/Limadou mission together with the presentation of the first on-orbit performance, including preliminary measurements of cosmic ray fluxes.