Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Fall 2022 Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics
Volume 67, Number 17
Thursday–Sunday, October 27–30, 2022; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA; New Orleans, Louisiana
Session PK: Mini-Symposium: Don't Look Up: Nuclear Data for Planetary Defense and Space Exploration |
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Chair: Patrick Peplowski, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab Room: Hyatt Regency Hotel Imperial 5AB |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 10:30AM - 11:06AM |
PK.00001: Just Look Up: Planetary Defense Invited Speaker: Mary T Burkey Of the many and increasing natural disasters that humans face on planet Earth, an asteroid impact is one cataclysmic event that can be completely averted with current technology and enough warning. Planetary Defense is a growing global campaign to identify potentially hazardous asteroids or comets, develop possible mitigation missions, and establish emergency response protocols if a mission fails. Though almost all extinction-size asteroids have been located, many smaller Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) remain undiscovered and could pose a threat. If an NEO is found to be on a collision course with Earth, depending on the length of warning time, there are multiple mission options to prevent a disaster. In an ideal scenario, with decades of notice, the recently-tested kinetic impactor mission is the preferred and most developed choice. However, a wide range of threat scenarios exist, especially in instances of short warning times, where a kinetic impactor would be insufficient to prevent disaster. In such cases, an alternate option is deploying a nuclear device to the NEO. Despite delivering the most energy per kg of launch mass, the effectiveness of a nuclear mitigation mission is highly dependent on the NEO's physical properties, such as size, shape, mass, composition, and structure. All these attributes may be either poorly constrained or completely unknown before a mission is launched and unlike a kinetic impactor, a nuclear mission cannot be tested beforehand. Thus, high-fidelity and efficient simulations of an NEO's response to the radiation a nuclear device emits (neutrons, gammas, and x rays) are essential for exploring the uncertainties of this mission-type. This talk will give an overview of Planetary Defense, show how a nuclear mitigation mission might be implemented, and highlight recent simulation advances using nuclear data-informed energy depositions to model an attempted asteroid deflection or disruption. |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 11:06AM - 11:18AM |
PK.00002: Precision measurements of neutron inelastic scattering cross sections for planetary nuclear spectroscopy Mauricio Ayllon Unzueta, Patrick N Peplowski, Jack Wilson, Ann M Parsons, Arun Persaud Measuring the elemental composition of planetary objects improves our understanding of the formation and evolution of our solar system. Additionally, localized measurements can inform about potential hazards, resources, and biosignatures that can revolutionize human space exploration activities. Orbital and in-situ neutron and gamma spectrometers have been used in the past to measure the elemental composition of asteroids, moons, and planets, while others are currently being designed and built for future missions, such as Dragonfly. |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 11:18AM - 11:30AM |
PK.00003: Prospects for Measurements of Production Cross Sections of Light Nuclei at RHIC Daniel A Cebra The damage due to cosmic rays is a serious concern for astronauts, electronics, and spacecraft. The heavy ion component is important because the damage due to ionization scales as Z2. In addition to the damage due to the primary ionization, the damage from secondary production of p, d, t, 3He, and 4He is also significant. Extensive double differential measurements for light fragment production were carried out for projectile energies below 3 GeV/n. However, no light nucleus production data exist for heavy ion projectile energies from 3-50 GeV/n. The Space Radiation Protection community has identified both cross section data and models as needed. Although several facilities that could produce heavy ion beams in this high energy range are planned, currently the only facilities that can address the needs are the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN (13-200 GeV/n) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL (3-125 GeV/n). Although RHIC is a collider, the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment has installed a fixed target and the Collider Accelerator Division (CAD) has developed an efficient conduct of operations to deliver ion beams to the target. The RHIC/STAR fixed target program has completed an energy scan with gold projectiles. These measurements demonstrate the capabilities of the STAR detector to make the light nucleus production measurements using particle identification with both ionization density (dE/dx) and time-of-fight (TOF). RHIC is a flexible facility and can deliver the ion beam species (He, C, Si, Fe) and energies (3-125 GeV/n) of need to the Space Radiation Community. STAR can install the targets of interest (C, Al, Fe) and can make the necessary light nucleus production cross section measurements. This talk will discuss the prospects for making these measurements during the RHIC ion beam running period from 2023-2025. |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 11:30AM - 11:42AM |
PK.00004: Preventing the Anthropocene Extinction with Nuclear Data Amber C Lauer-Coles
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Sunday, October 30, 2022 11:42AM - 11:54AM |
PK.00005: Modeling of laboratory benchmarks for planetary nuclear spectroscopy Jack Wilson, Patrick N Peplowski, Mauricio Ayllon Unzueta, Zachary Yokley Planetary nuclear spectroscopy involves using the detection of gamma rays and neutrons from planetary surfaces to infer their elemental composition. Linking measured count rates to elemental abundances is a complex task that requires Monte Carlo modeling of the production, transport and detection of neutrons and gamma rays. This technique has been successfully used on planetary science missions to the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and the asteroids Eros, Ceres and Vesta. However, significantly better precision measurements are required to meet the science goals of future investigations including NASA’s Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name, Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan and JAXA’s MMX mission to Mars’ moons. |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 11:54AM - 12:06PM |
PK.00006: Upgrading ENDF: Reaction Models and Formatting for Gamma Ray Production Emanuel V Chimanski, Bret R Beck, Lee A Bernstein, David A Brown, Roberto Capote, Godfree Gert, Aaron M Hurst, Amanda M Lewis, Calab M Mattoon, Elizabeth McCutchan, Chris Morse, Gustavo P Nobre, Shuya Ota, Andrej Trkov Neutron induced reactions generate gamma-rays that are unique to the target isotope, and the resulting spectra can be used as a fingerprint to identify the irradiated object. The so-called active neutron interrogation relies on evaluated nuclear data together with transport simulations and is employed in oil well logging, safeguards, planetary space science, etc. The available nuclear data libraries and modelling tools are incomplete, and there is strong need to improve the necessary tools to support interrogation applications. The deficiencies impact both secondary gamma emission, and correlations between deexcitations and neutron emissions. We are revising the gamma production data and formats in ENDF/B-VIII.0 to extend the modelling of particle-gamma and gamma-gamma coincidences. Our goal is to provide an in-line gamma cascade capabilities for both primary gammas and secondary cascade emissions, in addition to updating branching rations, energy levels, and gamma-ray energies. Here, we present selected results for gamma emissions from the neutron absorption channel. We model primary and cascade gammas with different reaction codes and compare the obtained spectrum to tabulated data from CapGam. Our efforts will support transport codes, e.g. MCNP, GEANT4, and Mercury. |
Sunday, October 30, 2022 12:06PM - 12:18PM |
PK.00007: The SENSER CLYC Experiment Jesus F Perello Izaguirre The Space and Endo-Atmospheric Nudet Surveillance Experimentation and Risk-Reduction (SENSER) mission launched in December 2021, aboard the STPSat-6 satellite, and is currently in geosynchronous orbit. SENSER is composed of several experimental instruments, including the Hard Radiation Experiment (HRE) CLYC instrument. HRE CLYC aims to evaluate the performance of Cs2LiYCl6 (CLYC) scintillators and silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) in the space environment. CLYC detectors enable neutron and gamma-ray detection within a single volume via pulse-shape discrimination and have been shown to have comparable energy resolution to common scintillators. This experiment will determine if these technologies are suitable for future space applications. This talk will discuss the CLYC instrument and present preliminary data collected during the first 6 months of operation. |
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