AirWatch
Home page of the Experiment: http://www.euso-mission.org/
The nature of the UHECR is one of the most
intriguing and controversial chapters of modern astro-particle
physics. A significant increase of the observed number of UHECR
(about twenty events observed up to now) would help to understand
the mystery of their nature and origin, the production and
transport mechanisms and the shape of the spectrum the highest
energies. However the UHECR flux reaching the Earth is very small
and therefore a complex experimental apparatus is required for
their observation.
The EAS observation from space by means of
a fast and high-granularity photo-detector allows to reconstruct
the longitudinal EAS profile, providing the energy and arrival
direction, as well as to gather information about the nature of
the primary particle. EUSO will observe the Earth night
atmosphere by looking to nadir with a large aperture and large
field of view optics focusing the image on the focal surface
photo-detector. The peculiar characteristics of the EAS,
especially the kinematical ones, allow one to distinguish them
from the various backgrounds, because those have a typically
different space-time development.
The experiment aims to extend the observed
energy spectrum of cosmic rays beyond 5·1019 eV with
a statistics of a few thousands events and to obtain a map of the
arrival directions of the EHECR extended to the entire sky. In
particular the possible flux of EHE cosmic neutrinos might be
observed.