PAMELA is a satellite-borne experiment that measures charged particles cosmic-ray spectra across a wide energy range up to a few hundreds of GeV. The instrument was launched on the 15^th of June 2006 onboard the Resurs-DK N.1 satellite. PAMELA instrument consists of a time-of-flight system, a magnetic spectrometer, a silicon-tungsten calorimeter,a shower detector, a neutron detector and a set of scintillator anticoincidence detectors. Every day millions of events are detected and the information downlinked from the instrument to the ground station located in Moscow, Russia. The daily volume of data is around 14 GB. This paper describes the in-orbit conditions, the instrument control, the data receiving process as well as all on-ground operations of quicklook analysis, data pre-processing and archiving.

PAMELA collaboration

Proceedings of the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference; Rogelio Caballero, Juan Carlos D'Olivo, Gustavo Medina-Tanco, Lukas Nellen, Federico A. Sánchez, José F. Valdés-Galicia (eds.); Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico, 2008; Vol. 2 (OG part 1), pages 361-364