ISS Expedition 56, with a new Pille dosimeter system on board the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, was successfully delivered to ISS in June 2018. We have just been informed that commissioning of the new reader was successful and the cross-read-outs of the old and the new system are going on.
As we reported it earlier, the new Pille reader is going to replace the instrument that has been in operation in the Zvezda module since 2003. The instrument package that has been recently delivered contains eight new Pille dosimeters as well. With this, the total number of Pille dosimeters on board increases to 20.
Two weeks later, on the 16th of July cosmonaut Sergey Prokopiev powered and switched on the new Pille reader and performed some electrical tests on it. On the 30th of July, Oleg Artemyev made the first cross-readings with the old and the new readers using both new and old sensors exposed to the space radiation in the very same location. Preliminary results show that the new system is operating properly!
Development of the very first version of the Pille instrument in our institute began 40 years ago and the story does not ends here. Our Russian partners expressed their intention to operate Pille on ISS until the end of the operation of the space station, i.e. at least until 2024.
Two Pille readers (the old one is to the left and the new one is to the right) are operated in parallel, next to each other on board the Russian Zvezda module of the International Space Station. In the close-up view, one of the older dosimeters has just been read out by the new reader unit (credits: RSC Enyergija/Roscosmos)
Maintenance and development of the Pille-ISS system in 2017 was funded by the Government of Hungary, contract number IKF/694/2017-NFM_SZERZ .