Ground-based x-ray calibration of the Astro-H/Hitomi soft x-ray telescopes

Abstract

We present the summary of the on-ground calibration of two soft x-ray telescopes (SXT-I and SXT-S), developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), onboard Astro-H/Hitomi. After the initial x-ray measurements with a diverging beam at the GSFC 100-m beamline, we performed the full calibration of the x-ray performance, using the 30-m x-ray beamline facility at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Japan. We adopted a raster scan method with a narrow x-ray pencil beam with a divergence of ∼15 00. The on-axis effective area (EA), half-power diameter, and vignetting function were measured at several energies between 1.5 and 17.5 keV. The detailed results appear in tables and figures in this paper. We measured and evaluated the performance of the SXT-S and the SXT-I with regard to the detectorlimited field-of-view and the pixel size of the paired flight detector, i.e., SXS and the SXI, respectively. The primary items measured are the EA, image quality, and stray light for on-axis and off-axis sources. The accurate measurement of these parameters is vital to make the precise response function of the ASTRO-H SXTs. This paper presents the definitive results of the ground-based calibration of the ASTRO-H SXTs.

Detailed design of the science operations for the XRISM mission

“…As a result, there were no delays in the schedule of software preparation and no delay in the release of tools and the calibration database. The products were well calibrated using instrument-specific methods, [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] because all the algorithms were imported into the analysis software and the latest calibration information was quickly released in the database. 5 2d-Hitomi − .…”

ATHENA WFI optical blocking filters development status toward the end of the instrument phase-A

“…Figure 2 shows a schematic drawing of the WFI showing the position of the FW OBF in the context of the main instrument subsystems. [25], as well as investigations performed for LOFT [26], the use of a thin polyimide film 150 nm thick coated with 30 nm of aluminum has been proposed as additional OBF to be mounted on the WFI FW [11]. The combination of the on-chip OBF and the above FW OBF provides an average transmission in the UV/Vis lower than 10 -6 and is very efficient in attenuating the spectral range where the hot stars have their maximum emission.…”

Xtend, the soft x-ray imaging telescope for the x-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission (XRISM)

“…4 Xtend is a soft X-ray "imaging" telescope, while Resolve is a soft X-ray "spectroscopy" telescope. Each of them consists of an X-ray Mirror Assembly (XMA), 5 a thin-foil-nested conically approximated Wolter-I optics, and a focal plane detector with a focal length of 5.6 m. The focal plane detector of Xtend is the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI), an X-ray CCD camera, 6 while that of Resolve is an X-ray micro-calorimeter. Fig.…”

“…CCD spectra shown below are all made with grade 0, 2, 3, 4, and 6 events unless otherwise indicated. every 80 logical rows † to be updated by in-orbit calibration Xtend's SXI and XMA have basically identical designs to the Hitomi X-ray CCD camera 12 and X-ray mirror, 19 respectively. The changes taken in Xtend are described in Ref.…”