A compact radiation monitor which incorporates a Geiger-Müller counter and two silicon detectors was designed and tested for radiation measurements on Turkish space rockets. The large area silicon PIN detectors, each with 4 quadrants produced in Turkey by TÜBİTAK BİLGEM UEKAE YİTAL laboratories, vertically aligned inside a thin aluminum shielding, separated by 3 PCBs as degraders, to perform coincidence logic and energy discrimination. Each quadrant is amplified separately to reduce the noise on readout cards designed by METU The Research and Application Center for Space and Accelerator Technologies (İVMER) which generate logical signals per layer, which are then coincided in a 7.8ns time window by an FPGA. The prototype also incorporates a Geiger-Müller tube sensitive to electrons and gammas to compare the counts of particles outside the box measured during test period. The I-V and C-V characterization of the PIN diodes, as well as detailed calibration of the readout electronics were performed. The device was tested at the METU-DBL (METU Defocusing Beam Line) proton beam line with 15 and 30 MeV proton beams as well as radioactive alpha and beta sources and shown to be sensitive to different particle species. The dynamic range, which has been demonstrated up to 106 particles/second lays the foundation for a robust radiation measurement with more detector and degrader layers for a larger energy range on a satellite over the South Atlantic Anomaly as well as van Allen belts.

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Abdulrahman Albarodi, M. Bilge Demirköz, Uğur Kılıç, Ahmet Baran Can, Deniz Orhun Boztemur, Egecan Karadöller, Aziz Ulvi Çalışkan, Güntekin Kabuli, Levent Balamir Tavacıoğlu, "Design and characterization of a compact radiation monitor for space rockets",RAD Conf. Proc, vol. 5, 2021, pp. 125–131, http://doi.org/10.21175/RadProc.2021.24