Mini-EUSO: A high resolution detector for the study of terrestrial and cosmic UV emission from the International Space Station

Abstract The Mini-EUSO instrument is a UV telescope to be placed inside the International Space Station(ISS), looking down on the Earth from a nadir-facing window in the Russian Zvezda module. Mini-EUSO will map the earth in the UV range (300–400 nm) with a spatial resolution of 6.11 km and a temporal resolution of 2.5 μs, offering the opportunity to study a variety of atmospheric events such as transient luminous events (TLEs) and meteors, as well as searching for strange quarkmatter and bioluminescence. Furthermore, Mini-EUSO will be used to detect space debristo verify the possibility of using a EUSO-class telescope in combination with a high energy laserfor space debrisremediation. The high-resolution mapping of the UV emissions from Earth orbit allows Mini-EUSO to serve as a pathfinderfor the study of Extreme Energy Cosmic Rays (EECRs) from space by the JEM-EUSO collaboration.