Characterization of more than three years of in-orbit radiation damage of SiPMs on GRBAlpha and VZLUSAT-2 CubeSats

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Authors	ŘÍPA Jakub DAFČÍKOVÁ Marianna KOSÍK Pavel MÜNZ Filip OHNO Masanori GALGÓCZI Gábor WERNER Norbert PÁL András MÉSZÁROS László CSÁK Balázs FUKAZAWA Yasushi TAKAHASHI Hiromitsu MIZUNO Tsunefumi NAKAZAWA Kazuhiro ODAKA Hirokazu ICHINOHE Yuto KAPUŠ Jakub HUDEC Jan FRAJT Marcel REZENOV Maksim DÁNIEL Vladimír SVOBODA Petr DUDÁŠ Juraj SABOL Martin LÁSZLÓ Róbert KOLEDA Martin ĎURÍŠKOVÁ Michaela SZAKSZONOVÁ Lea KOLÁŘ Martin HUSÁRIKOVÁ Nikola RIFFALD SOUZA BREUER Jean-Paul Bernhard HROCH Filip VÍTEK Tomáš VEŘTÁT Ivo URBANEC Tomáš POVALAČ Aleš KASAL Miroslav HANÁK Peter ŠMELKO Miroslav TOPINKA Martin CHANG Hsiang-Kuang LIU Tsung-Che LIN Chih-Hsun HU Chin-Ping TSAO Che-Chih
Year of publication	2025
Type	Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source	Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment
MU Faculty or unit	Faculty of Science
Citation
web	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2025.170513
Doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2025.170513
Keywords	SiPM; MPPC; Radiation damage; Space environment; LEO; CubeSat
Description	Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are prone to radiation damage which causes an increase of dark count rate. This leads to an increase in low-energy threshold in a gamma-ray detector combining SiPM and a scintillator. Despite this drawback, they are becoming preferred for scintillator-based gamma-ray detectors on CubeSats due to their low operation voltage, small size, linear response to low light intensity and fast response. This increasing popularity of SiPMs among new spaceborne missions makes it important to characterize their long-term performance in the space environment. In this work, we report the change of the dark count rate and low-energy threshold of S13360-3050 PE multi-pixel photon counters (MPPCs) by Hamamatsu, using measurements acquired by the GRBAlpha and VZLUSAT-2 CubeSats at low Earth orbit (LEO) spanning over three years. Such a long measurement of the performance of MPPCs in space has not been published before. GRBAlpha is a 1U CubeSat launched on March 22, 2021, to a 550 km altitude sun-synchronous polar orbit (SSO) carrying on board a gamma-ray detector based on CsI(Tl) scintillator readout by eight MPPCs and regularly detecting gamma-ray transients such as gamma-ray bursts and solar flares in the energy range of ~ 30-900 keV. VZLUSAT-2 is a 3U CubeSat launched on January 13, 2022 also to a 535 km altitude SSO carrying on board, among other payloads, two gamma-ray detectors similar to the one on GRBAlpha. We have flight-proven the Hamamatsu MPPCs S13360-3050 PE and demonstrated that MPPCs, shielded by 2.5 mm of PbSb alloy, can be used in LEO environment on a scientific mission lasting beyond three years. This manifests the potential of MPPCs being employed in future satellites.
Related projects:	Joint Gamma Ray Bursts Observations with Small Satellites