The AGILE silicon tracker: Pre-launch and in-flight configuration

Bulgarelli, A.; Argan, A.; Barbiellini, G.; Basset, M.; Chen, Andrew; Cocco, G. Di; Foggetta, L.; Gianotti, F.; Giuliani, A.; Longo, F.; Mereghetti, S.; Monzani, Fabio; Nicolini, L.; Pavesi, Riccardo; Prest, M.; Pucella, G.; Tavani, M.; Trifoglio, M.; Trois, A.; Vallazza, E.; Vercellone, S.

doi:10.1016/j.nima.2009.12.051

Cited by 28 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…AGILE exploits for the first time on a satellite-borne mission the technology of silicon detectors for the imaging of gamma rays and hard X-rays. In fact both its imaging instruments, the Silicon Tracker 2,3 (the pair conversion stage of a gamma-ray telescope) and SuperAGILE 4 (a hard X-ray monitor), are based on the same silicon microstrip detector tiles, with 9.5 cm × 9.5 cm surface, 121 µm pitch and 410 µm thickness, manufactured by Hamamatsu. The AGILE payload includes also a NaI(Tl) Minicalorimeter (MCAL 5 ) and is enclosed by a plastic scintillator Anticoincidence 6 system.…”

Section: Agilementioning

confidence: 99%

Rolling and tumbling: status of the SuperAGILE experiment

Monte

Costa

Persio

et al. 2010

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray

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The SuperAGILE experiment is the hard X-ray monitor of the AGILE mission. It is a 2 x one-dimensional imager, with 6-arcmin angular resolution in the energy range 18 -60 keV and a field of view in excess of 1 steradian. SuperAGILE is successfully operating in orbit since Summer 2007, providing long-term monitoring of bright sources and prompt detection and localization of gamma-ray bursts. Starting on October 2009 the AGILE mission lost its reaction wheel and the satellite attitude is no longer stabilized. The current mode of operation of the AGILE satellite is a Spinning Mode, around the Sun-pointing direction, with an angular velocity of about 0.8 degree/s (corresponding to 8 times the SuperAGILE point spread function every second). In these new conditions, SuperAGILE continuously scans a much larger fraction of the sky, with much smaller exposure to each region. In this paper we review some of the results of the first 2.5 years of "standard" operation of SuperAGILE, and show how new implementations in the data analysis software allows to continue the hard X-ray sky monitoring by SuperAGILE also in the new attitude conditions.

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Section: Agilementioning

confidence: 99%

Rolling and tumbling: status of the SuperAGILE experiment

Monte

Costa

Persio

et al. 2010

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray

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“…The AGILE payload detector consists of the Silicon Tracker (ST) (Barbiellini et al 2001;Prest et al 2003;Bulgarelli et al 2010;Cattaneo et al 2011) the Super-AGILE X-ray detector (Feroci et al 2007), the CsI(Tl) Mini-Calorimeter (MCAL) (Labanti et al 2009), and an AntiCoincidence (AC) system (Perotti et al 2006). The combination of ST, MCAL and AC forms the Gamma-Ray Imaging Detector (GRID).…”

Section: Agile-grid Instrument Data and Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second AGILE catalogue of gamma-ray sources

Bulgarelli

Fioretti

Parmiggiani

et al. 2019

A&A

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Aims. We present the second AGILE-GRID Catalog (2AGL) of γ-ray sources in the 100 MeV -10 GeV energy range. Methods. With respect to previous AGILE-GRID catalogs, the current 2AGL Catalog is based on the first 2.3 years of science data from the AGILE mission (the so called 'pointing mode') and incorporates more data and several analysis improvements, including better calibrations at the event reconstruction level, an updated model for the Galactic diffuse γ-ray emission, a refined procedure for point-like source detection, and the inclusion of a search for extended γ-ray sources.Results. The 2AGL Catalog includes 175 high-confidence sources (above 4σ significance) with their location regions and spectral properties, and a variability analysis with 4-day light curves for the most significant ones. Relying on the error region of each source position, including systematic uncertainties, 121 sources are considered as positionally associated with known couterparts at different wavelengths or detected by other γ-ray instruments. Among the identified or associated sources, 62 are Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) of the blazar class. Pulsars represent the largest Galactic source class, with 40 associated pulsars, 7 of them with detected pulsation; 8 Supernova Remnants and 4 high-mass X-ray binaries have also been identified. A substantial number of 2AGL sources are unidentified: for 54 sources no known counterpart is found at different wavelengths. Among these sources, we discuss a sub-class of 29 AGILE-GRID-only γ-ray sources that are not present in 1FGL, 2FGL or 3FGL catalogs; the remaining sources are unidentified in both 2AGL and 3FGL Catalogs. We also present an extension of the analysis of 2AGL sources detected in the 50 -100 MeV energy range.

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“…The reconstruction filter has several, sometimes conflicting, goals: reconstructing tracks, estimating their directions and energies, combining them to identify γ-ray, rejecting background hits from noise and charged particle escaping the AC veto and providing an estimation of the probability that the measured tracks originate by a pair converted γ-ray. The filter used in this analysis, FM3.119 (Bulgarelli et al 2010;Chen et al 2011), is the result of an optimisation between those requirements and has been used in all AGILE scientific analyses.…”

Section: Reconstruction Filtermentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibration of AGILE-GRID with On-ground Data and Monte Carlo Simulations

Cattaneo

Rappoldi

Argan

et al. 2018

ApJ

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AGILE is a mission of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Scientific Program dedicated to γ-ray astrophysics, operating in a low Earth orbit since April 23, 2007. It is designed to be a very light and compact instrument, capable of simultaneously detecting and imaging photons in the 18 keV to 60 keV X-ray energy band and in the 30 MeV-50 GeV γ-ray energy with a good angular resolution (≈ 1 • @ 1 GeV). The core of the instrument is the Silicon Tracker complemented with a CsI calorimeter and a AntiCoincidence system forming the Gamma Ray Imaging Detector (GRID). Before launch, the GRID needed on-ground calibration with a tagged γ-ray beam to estimate its performance and validate the Monte Carlo simulation. The GRID was calibrated using a tagged γ-ray beam with energy up to 500 MeV at the Beam Test Facilities at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati. These data are used to validate a GEANT3 based simulation by comparing the data and the Monte Carlo simulation by measuring the angular and energy resolutions. The GRID angular and energy resolutions Corresponding author: P.W. Cattaneo paolo.cattaneo@pv.infn.it arXiv:1805.10804v1 [astro-ph.IM] 28 May 2018 Cattaneo P.W. et al.obtained using the beam agree well with the Monte Carlo simulation. Therefore the simulation can be used to simulate the same performance on-flight with high reliability.

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The AGILE silicon tracker: Pre-launch and in-flight configuration

Cited by 28 publications

References 6 publications

Rolling and tumbling: status of the SuperAGILE experiment

Rolling and tumbling: status of the SuperAGILE experiment

Second AGILE catalogue of gamma-ray sources

Calibration of AGILE-GRID with On-ground Data and Monte Carlo Simulations

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