ANALYSIS OF THE PRE-FLIGHT AND POSTFLIGHT CALIBRATION PROCEDURES PERFORMED ON THE LIULIN SPACE RADIATION DOSIMETER

Liulin, a dosimetry-radiometry system, was developed to satisfy the re quirements for active flux and dose rate measurements for the flight o f the second Bulgarian cosmonaut in 1988. The system consists of a com pact battery-operated silicon solid state detector unit and a read/wri te microcomputer and telemetry unit We describe the pre-flight calibra tions with charged particles, using radioactive sources and accelerate d 170 MeV/nucleon proton and alpha particles at the Dubna, Russia cycl otron. We discuss comparisons with data obtained on Mir with the Frenc h-built tissue equivalent LET spectrometer NAUSICAA. Lastly, we descri be post-flight calibrations performed with I GeV/nucleon Fe-56 ions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory AGS accelerator, where the instrum ent was mounted in tandem with several thin position-sensitive silicon detectors behind a stopping target. The silicon detectors provided an energy spectrum for the surviving charged nuclear fragments for which the flux and absorbed dose were recorded by Liulin. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.