FIT: the scintillating fiber tracker of the HERD space mission

The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility is a space payload proposed to be installed onboard the China's Space Station (CSS). The aims of HERD are the indirect detection of dark matter, the direct detection of cosmic rays towards the "knee" of the spectrum (similar to 1 PeV) and the monitoring of the full gamma-ray sky from 100 MeV. The HERD core is a calorimeter capable of accepting particles incident on its top and four lateral sides, each equipped with a sector of the scintillating fiber tracker: FIT. The FIT sectors host 7 tracking planes made of modules. The module, composed of a fiber mat and three arrays of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), is the elementary brick of FIT. Several FIT modules have been built and tested with particle beams at CERN. A FIT demonstrator, made of two partially instrumented tracking planes, has been assembled and sent through vibration tests. The results of the performed tests as well as the current design of FIT are presented in this contribution.