Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays in Space: The Extreme Universe Space Observatory EUSO is an experiment to be operated on the Japanese Module of the International Space Station ISS of NASA, ESA, JAXA and other partners. EUSO will look down from 400 km altitude on about a million square kilometres of atmosphere, which serves as a cheap detector medium, and observe the light flashes produced by the highest energy cosmic rays (or interacting neutrinos) in the air. EUSO can record about 30 x more events than the Auger South experiment. The EUSO instrument is at present under study and could be launched in 2013. See here a movie of the deployment. A related project is S-EUSO which aims for a comparable instrument on a free-flying satellite. As the altitude of its orbit is about 1000 km, it offers a larger field of view, but it is more challenging to detect the atmospheric showers. The earliest launch date is 2017.
