GRAND antennas are flourishing in the Argentinian pampa! Over the past weeks, four out of ten GRAND@Auger detection units have been deployed at the AERA site of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The deployment efforts were brilliantly conducted by the GRAND teams of Radboud University and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and with the precious technical help of Juan Pablo Góngora, who works on the site of the Auger Observatory. One neat feature of this prototype, developed at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, is that the central data-acquisition system of GRAND@Auger can be accessed remotely from anywhere in the world! Not only that, but we are aiming to have all the collected data to be transferrable via 4G to the entire GRAND collaboration. We are thankful to the Pierre Auger Observatory and its collaboration and technical boards, without whose approval this deployment would not have been possible.
Upon completion, GRAND@Auger is expected to observe a handful of cosmic rays per day with energies around 1017 eV. Some of these cosmic rays are also expected to be observed in coincidence with the AMIGA infill array of Auger, which consists of water-Cherenkov tanks, thus allowing for important crosschecks of the GRAND antennas. Nonetheless, with GRAND@Auger taking data and complementing the GP13 prototype in China, GRAND has now become a true intercontinental endeavor!
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