The PolarquEEEst mission: Measuring the cosmic ray flux at the North Pole

The PolarquEEEst mission was designed and realised within the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project experiment, a strategic project of “Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi”, Rome. PolarquEEEst is a campaign to measure the cosmic rays flux at the highest latitudes which took place between July and September 2018. The detector used is made of two scintillator planes coupled to Silicon Photo Multipliers (SiPM); it was installed on the Nanuq, a 18 meter sailing boat which, leaving from Iceland, circumnavigated the Svalbard islands (less than 1000 km from the North Pole) and concluded its cruise in Norway. The trip was carried out within the Polarquest project 1928–2018, an expedition to commemorate the unfortunate mission of the airship ITALIA, on the occasion of its 90th anniversary. Other two identical detectors were installed in Norway and Italy, in order to allow a comparative measurement of the cosmic flux over more than 40 degrees of latitude and also to look for possible long-distance correlations. Here we report the details of the detector and the first results.