Overview of the JEM-EUSO Mission

Roy Young

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

JEM-EUSO (Extreme Universe Space Observatory on-board the Japanese Experiment Module of ISS) is a science mission which observes the particles with extreme energies around 10^20 eV. The observation of the particles will be performed by the detection of the optical signals, time and space- resolved, following the traces of the particles in Earth's atmosphere. It is the direct successor of the EUSO mission, which had been selected in the year 2000 by European Space Agency (ESA), but was postponed after its successful completion of the phase-A study.

JEM-EUSO is designed to detect more than 1,000 events above 7 × 10^19 eV during its five years' operation. This overwhelmingly high statistics permits us to achieve our main scientific objective: astronomy and astrophysics through the particle channel with extreme energies to identify sources by arrival direction analysis, and to measure the energy spectra from the individual sources, which will constrain acceleration or emission mechanism. JEM-EUSO was selected as one of the mission candidates of the second phase utilization of JEM/EF. The phase-A (feasibility study and conceptual design) study has been conducted by RIKEN and JAXA, in cooperation with an international team of scientists from twelve countries, Japan, USA, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Spain, Poland, and Slovakia, aiming at the launch in 2013-2015 time-frame. It is designed to be transferred to ISS by HTV (H2 Transfer Vehicle).

Presented at ISDC 2011 - Huntsville. Paper and presentation charts are not available.