Performance and science reach of POEMMA for ultrahigh-energy particles

Understand

The Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) is a potential NASA Astrophysics Probe-class mission designed to observe ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and cosmic neutrinos from space.

• POEMMA will monitor colossal volumes of the Earth's atmosphere to detect extensive air showers (EASs) produced by extremely energetic cosmic messengers: UHECRs above 20 EeV over the full sky and cosmic neutrinos above 20 PeV.
• We focus most of this study on the impact of POEMMA for UHECR science by simulating the detector response and mission performance for EAS from UHECRs.
• We show that POEMMA will provide a significant increase in the statistics of observed UHECRs at the highest energies over the entire sky.