High Energy Astro-particle Physics with the CALET Experiment

The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) will be installed on the Exposure Facility of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-EF) on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014 where it will measure the cosmic-ray fluxes for five years. Its main scientific goals are to search for dark matter, investigate the mechanism of cosmic-ray acceleration and propagation in the Galaxy and discover possible astrophysical sources of high-energy electrons nearby the Earth. The instrument, under construction, consists of two layers of segmented plastic scintillators for the cosmic-ray charge identification (CHD), a 3 X0-thick tungsten-scintillating fiber imaging calorimeter (IMC) and a 27 X0-thick lead-tungstate calorimeter (TASC). The CHD can provide single-element separation in the interval of atomic number Z from 1 to 40, while IMC and TASC can measure the energy of cosmic-ray particles with excellent resolution in the range from few GeV up to several hundreds of TeV. Moreover, the fine granularity of IMC and TASC allows to image the longitudinal and lateral development of showers, a key issue to provide high electron/hadron discrimination. In this paper, we will review the status of the mission, the instrument configuration and its expected performance, and the CALET capability to measure the different components of the cosmic radiation.