Solar Power Supply and Environmental Control System for DIMS Experiment

The DIMS (Dark matter and Interstellar Meteoroid Study) experiment is aimed at searching for macroscopic dark matter such as nuclearites and SQM (strange quark matter) and observing interstellar meteoroids. The DIMS experiment system is under construction at the CLF, BRM, and TARA sites of the Telescope Array cosmic-ray experiment facility in Utah, USA. The DIMS experiment system consists of four high-sensitivity camera modules, each of which will be installed at sites about 20 km apart. Since there is no power supply from the power company at the CLF site, a self-sufficient power supply system is required. Therefore, we developed a new solar power generation system and performed an experiment in Japan first. Since the DIMS experiment system needs to run stably every night for a long period of time, it is necessary to monitor and control the environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity in the camera module at each site. Therefore, we have developed an environmental monitoring and control system for the camera module. In this paper, we report on the development and test results of the solar power generation system, which provides self-sufficient electricity for this experiment, and the environmental monitoring and control system for the camera modules.