PLANETOCOSMICS is a simulation framework based on Geant4 that allows to compute the hadronic and electromagnetic interactions of cosmic rays with the Earth, Mars and Mercury. For each planet it is possible to take into account the presence of the magnetic field, atmosphere and soil. Following the planet that is considered different magnetic field models and atmospheric models are available. The code has been developed such that the addition of new models and new planets should be quite simple.

The main applications of the code are :

• The computation of the flux of particles resulting from the interaction of cosmic rays with the planet at user defined altitudes, atmospheric depths and in the soil.
• The computation of the energy deposited by cosmic rays showers in the planet atmosphere and in the soil.
• The study of quasi trapped particle population
• The computation of the propagation of charged particles in the planet magnetosphere.
• The computation of cutoff rigidity in function of position and direction of incidence.
• The visualisation of magnetic field lines, and trajectories of primary and secondary particles in the planet environment.

Two different versions of PLANETOCOSMICS have been developed, that differ in the analysis package used for histogramming. In the first version the ROOT package is used to store the results of the code in histograms. In the second version the analysis part of the code has been developed in compliance with the AIDA interface.

The development of PLANETOCOSMICS has been funded by ESA/ESTEC (contract 17774/04/NL/LvH/gm). PLANETOCOSMICS is an extension of the MAGNETOCOSMICS and ATMOCOSMICS codes that compute the propagation of cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. These two applications were developed in the frame of the SEPTIMESS project sponsored by ESA/ESTEC (contract 16339/02/NL/FM/nv).

Latest news

Version 2.0 released on September 1st 2006

• The computation of the energy deposited in the soil and the computation of the flux of secondary particles in the soil have been added to the code. Click here to see the modifications brought to this new version.

© 2005 Laurent Desorgher, Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bern , CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
Last modified 01.09.2006