Antarctic node of the LAGO collaboration cosmic rays observatory: State of the art and results of the 2017-2018 antarctic campaign

GULISANO A.M.; PEREIRA, M.; THE LAGO COLLABORATION; ARESO, O.; EREÑU, U.; DASSO, S.; ROMANELLI, M.; IZA, F.

Pasadena, California

Congreso; COSPAR scientific Assembly; 2018

The LAGO (Latin American Giant Observatory) project is a collaborative network formed byeleven countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico,Peru, Spain, and Venezuela), forming a network of Water Cherenkov detectors (WCDs) withnodes at sites with different rigidity cut-offs and different altitudes. One of the aims of LAGOis to study the flux of secondary particles at ground level, and to link them with the associatedprimary fluxes to better understand the modulation of galactic CRs in the heliosphere and theproperties of solar particles of high energy, the so-called Ground Level Enhancements, GLEs.Another main purpose is to monitor this flux to provide operative Space Weather information.WCDs have shown to be able to reproduce time structures compatible with those observed withneutron monitors (NMs) and its major advantage compared with NMs is that the former onescan discriminate energy channels for the observed secondary charged particles. From numericalsimulations, this energy discrimination can be used for a better understanding of the flux ofprimary CRs arriving to the terrestrial environment. We present here an update of the state ofthe art of the LAGO Antarctic node, in the Argentine Marambio base, located at the Antarcticpeninsula. This node has the minimum rigidity cut-off (Rc 2 GV for quiet geomagneticconditions) of the Observatory, and it is the only LAGO node able to observe GLEs. Wepresent the LAGO Antarctic campaign of 2017 in Marambio, where a meteorological station,a thermal control system, a magnetometer, and the telemetry system, were installed.