DAMPE silicon tracker on-board data compression algorithm

Abstract

The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is an upcoming scientific satellite mission for high energy gamma-ray, electron and cosmic rays detection. The silicon tracker (STK) is a sub detector of the DAMPE payload with an excellent position resolution (readout pitch of 242um), which measures the incident direction of particles, as well as charge. The STK consists 12 layers of Silicon Micro-strip Detector (SMD), equivalent to a total silicon area of 6.5m$^2$. The total readout channels of the STK are 73728, which leads to a huge amount of raw data to be dealt. In this paper, we focus on the on-board data compression algorithm and procedure in the STK, which was initially verified by cosmic-ray measurements.