The pamela experiment: Five years of cosmic rays investigation

In five years of data taking in space, the PAMELA experiment collected very interesting data on the charged cosmic radiation over a wide energy range (from 100 MeV up to 1 TeV, depending from the species) with unprecedent statistics. The apparatus comprises a time-of-flight system, a silicon-microstrip magnetic spectrometer, a silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter, an anticoincidence system, a shower tail counter scintillator and a neutron detector. PAMELA is providing fundamental data not only to search for dark matter signals but also to better understand cosmic-ray propagation models. Main results after five years of data taking will be presented.