First results from PolarquEEEst

During the summer of 2018 the PolarQuest 2018 ship expedition cruised to the North Pole region. One of the four experiments installed on the boat was PolarquEEEst, a cosmic ray detector developed within the Extreme Energy Events project. The PolarquEEEst purpose is to measure the cosmic ray flux at sea level and at extreme latitudes in a very poorly explored region. The POLA-01 detector, designed to fit the strong requirements for an on-board installation, is composed of two planes (four tiles each) of scintillators. Two similar detectors POLA-02 and POLA-03 were also installed in fixed locations, in Norway and Italy respectively, to be used as a reference. The high stability of the POLA-01 detector in the whole period allowed to collect data from 66° N to 82° N latitudes and to look for variations on the cosmic ray flux when moving towards the North Pole, using POLA-02 and POLA-03 measurements to remove time-fluctuations affecting the flux. The first results collected during the expedition will be reported. The PolarquEEEst mission continued its trip in Italy to perform measurement down to 35 N with POLA-01, which has been recently installed with POLA-03 and the newely built POLA-04 in the Svalbard islands to collect data for a long period.