The PAMELA silicon tracker

The silicon tracker of the PAMELA apparatus has been assembled and it is ready to fly on-board the Russian satellite Resurs DK for a 3-year mission. The experiment will study, mainly, spectra of particles and antiparticles in cosmic rays. The magnetic spectrometerʹs primary goal is to precisely measure momenta of charged particles, whose trajectories have been bent by a permanent magnet. The detector is composed of 6 planes of double-sided silicon microstrip detectors, inserted between adjacent modules of a permanent magnet which produces an almost uniform magnetic field inside a rectangular cavity that particles cross. The spatial resolution of the detectors is about 3 μm for the bending coordinate. velopment of such detectors required a complex manufacturing procedure in order to preserve the physical performance in a device suitable for a space mission. In the construction phase data originating from both beam tests and simulation helped to check the detectorʹs characteristics and to optimize the achievable spatial resolution. The development and the final assembling of these detectors are described in this paper.