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ACCEPTED as P19.43 Luca Latronico (poster) page
The calorimeter (CAL) and the AntiCoincidence Detector (ACD) of the GLAST LAT telescope will be calibrated in flight with cosmic-ray heavy ions. A dedicated high level threshold in the ACD will trigger heavy ion events, and the pulse amplitude in the CAL and the ACD will be used to identify different ion species and calibrate the readout electronics. Tracker (TKR) information will be used to precisely identify the impact point and the path length of the ions in the plastic scintillators of the ACD and the CsI logs of the CAL. Such mode of operation was successfully tested in a heavy ion beam test carried out on the LAT Calibration Unit (CU) with Carbon and Xenon ions from the GSI synchrotron. The CU is a detector built with two complete flight spare modules, a third calorimeter and 5 ACD tiles which underwent a major beam test campaign in 2006 to validate the LAT MonteCarlo simulation with different particle beams.
The behaviour of all the three subsystems (TKR, CAL, ACD) under heavy ion irradiation is discussed in this poster, as well as the results that provide the necessary input for the optimization of the strategy for on-orbit calibration.