Speaker
Description
Mini-EUSO is a telescope launched on board the International Space Station in 2019. Located in the Russian section of the station it has successfully performed so far more than 150 sessions with the aim of remotely sensing our planet from a nadir-facing UV-transparent window in the Zvezda module. The instrument is based on an optical system employing two Fresnel lenses and a focal surface composed of 36 Multi-Anode Photomultiplier tubes, 64 channels each, for a total of 2304 channels with single photon counting sensitivity and an overall field of view of 44$^\circ$. Mini-EUSO has multidisciplinary scientific objectives, among them the search for nuclearites and Strange Quark Matter, the study of atmospheric phenomena such as Transient Luminous Events, cloud distributions, meteors and meteoroids, the observation of sea bioluminescence. Mini-EUSO can map the night-time Earth in the near UV range (predominantly between 290 – 430 nm), with a spatial resolution of about 5.9 km and different temporal resolutions of 2.5 $\mu$s, 320 $\mu$s and 41 ms. Mini-EUSO observations are extremely important to better assess the potential of a space-based detector of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) such as POEMMA. In this contribution we describe the detector and present the various atmospheric phenomena observed in more than five years of operation and place them in the context of future space-based observatories of UHECRs, focusing on the perspective for remote sensing of the atmosphere and on the observation of lightning phenomena.