Calorimetric Electron Telescope
| Alternative names | CALET |
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| Organization |
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency 
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| Telescope style |
space observatory
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The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) is a space telescope being mainly used to perform high precision observations of electrons and gamma rays. It tracks the trajectory of electrons, protons, nuclei, and gamma rays and measures their direction, charge and energy, which may help understand the nature of dark matter or nearby sources of high-energy particle acceleration.
The mission was developed and sponsored by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), involving teams from Japan, Italy and USA. CALET launched aboard JAXA's H-II Transfer Vehicle Kounotori 5 (HTV-5) in August 2015 and was placed on the International Space Station's Japanese Kibo module.
CALET is an astrophysics mission that searches for signatures of dark matter and provides the highest energy direct measurements of the cosmic ray electron spectrum in order to observe discrete sources of high-energy particle acceleration in our local region of the galaxy. The mission was developed and sponsored by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), involving teams from Japan, Italy and USA. It seeks to understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays in the Milky Way galaxy, to identify their sources of acceleration, their elemental composition as a function of energy, and possibly to unveil the nature of dark matter. Such sources seem to be able to accelerate particles to energies far higher than scientists can achieve on Earth using the largest accelerators. Understanding how nature does this is important to space travel and has possible applications here on Earth. The CALET Principal Investigator is Shoji Torii from the Waseda University, Japan; John Wefel is the co-principal investigator for the US team; Pier S. Marrocchesi, is the co-investigator from the Italy team.
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