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Esteban Debordes and Daniel Smirnov with teacher Luc Denis from Institut Vallée Bailly in the cleanroom preparing Peregrinus for integration on the Payload Integration Plate for Ariane 6 in French Guiana, 24 May 2024.
Peregrinus is an experiment fixed onboard Ariane 6, developed by high-school students at Sint-Pieterscollege and Institut Vallée Bailly in Belgium. The science mission’s goal in orbit is to measure the correlation between Earth’s magnetic field and the intensity of X-ray and gamma radiation.
The experiment is named after Petrus Peregrinus, a French medieval scholar who studied magnetism and – unusual for his time – favoured an experimental approach to studying the natural world as opposed to a philosophical one.
Orbiting Earth onboard Ariane 6 at an altitude of 580 km, Peregrinus will provide data on the impact of solar activity on and levels of radiation in Earth’s magnetic field. Better understanding in this area helps assess radiation risks to astronauts on the Moon or en route to Mars.
The experiment includes a ‘solid state’ radiation detector – a type of detector in which a semiconductor material, such as silicon, provides a signal when a particle passes through it, ‘liberating’ a charge. This detector is encapsulated in a photodiode or ‘photodetector’ – a semiconductor that translates light into electrical energy.
With Peregrinus, the team will count hard X-ray photons (the highest energy X-rays) and soft Gamma-ray photons (the least energetic Gamma-rays) over a one-second interval, while also measuring Earth's magnetic field using an ‘LSM9DS1’ inertial measurement device over a period of 10 seconds.
This all-in-one orientation unit can sense and provide information with nine degrees of freedom. It can tell where Earth is and how fast Peregrinus is moving in 3D space by measuring gravity; a magnetometer can determine where magnetic north is, and a gyroscope will measure the upper stage’s spin and twist. All this data is compressed to save space and transmitted to the ground via the Iridium satellite network.