Performances of JEM-EUSO: angular reconstruction

Mounted on the International Space Station(ISS), the Extreme Universe Space Observatory, on-board the Japanese Experimental Module (JEM-EUSO), relies on the well established fluorescence technique to observe Extensive Air Showers (EAS) developing in the earth’s atmosphere. Focusing on the detection of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) in the decade of 10 20 eV, JEM-EUSO will face new challenges by applying this technique from space. The EUSO Simulation and Analysis Framework (ESAF) has been developed in this context to provide a full end-to-end simulation frame, and assess the overall performance of the detector. Within ESAF, angular reconstruction can be separated into two conceptually different steps. The first step is pattern recognition, or filtering, of the signal to separate it from the background. The second step is to perform different types of fitting in order to search for the relevant geometrical parameters that best describe the previously selected signal. In this paper, we discuss some of the techniques we have implemented in ESAF to perform the geometrical reconstruction of EAS seen by JEM-EUSO. We also conduct thorough tests to assess the performances of these techniques in conditions which are relevant to the scope of the JEM-EUSO mission. We conclude by showing the expected angular resolution in the energy range that JEM-EUSO is expected to observe.