The close collaboration between the CIRA Space Qualification Laboratory and the Naples section of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) is continuing profitably also in 2023 with activities for the construction and qualification of systems for conducting important scientific experiments.

In particular, at LQS, the sophisticated power supply system of the GAPS (General AntiParticle Spectrometer), built at the Naples section of INFN, was successfully qualified. Developed by NASA, JAXA, INFN and ASI, the GAPS will fly aboard a stratospheric balloon for a period of 30 days, starting from McMurdo Station, the largest US base in Antarctica.

 Also within the GAPS project, the CIRA/INFN collaboration achieved the qualification of a SiLi cosmic ray detector module which represents the fundamental unit of the set of detectors of the GAPS Tracker, the heart of the entire experiment. During the detector qualification phase, the functional tests were successfully carried out and also allowed the acquisition of atmospheric muons inside the CIRA environmental chamber. 

​The other qualification activities concerned the 3 Photo Detection Modules (PDM), and the respective power and control electronics, of a fluorescence telescope which represents the main instrument of the EUSO-SPB2 experiment (Extreme Universe Space Observatory - Super Pressure Balloon 2). The latter is a NASA mission (belonging to the POEMMA project) whose objective is the observation from a stratospheric balloon of very high energy cosmic rays, in particular of neutrinos.