  The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) will be installed on the Exposure
Facility of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-EF) on the International Space
Station (ISS) in 2014 where it will measure the cosmic-ray fluxes for five
years. Its main scientific goals are to search for dark matter, investigate the
mechanism of cosmic-ray acceleration and propagation in the Galaxy and discover
possible astrophysical sources of high-energy electrons nearby the Earth. The
instrument, under construction, consists of two layers of segmented plastic
scintillators for the cosmic-ray charge identification (CHD), a 3 X$_0$-thick
tungsten-scintillating fiber imaging calorimeter (IMC) and a 27 X$_0$-thick
lead-tungstate calorimeter (TASC). The CHD can provide single-element
separation in the interval of atomic number Z from 1 to 40, while IMC and TASC
can measure the energy of cosmic-ray particles with excellent resolution in the
range from few GeV up to several hundreds of TeV. Moreover, IMC and TASC
provide the longitudinal and lateral development of the shower, a key issue for
good electron/hadron discrimination. In this paper, we will review the status
of the mission, the instrument configuration and its expected performance, and
the CALET capability to measure the different components of the cosmic
radiation.
