SuperAGILE: the X-ray Monitor for AGILE
Abstract
SuperAGILE is the X-ray stage of AGILE gamma-ray observatory. It is devoted to monitor X-ray (10-40 keV) sources with a sensitivity better than 10 mCrabs in one observing day and to detect hard X-ray transients in a field of view of 1.8 sr, well matched to that of the gamma-ray tracker, with few arc-minutes position resolution. SuperAGILE is designed to exploit one additional layer of four silicon microstrip detectors, for a total geometric area of 1444 cm2, on top of the AGILE tracker and a system of four mutually orthogonal unidimensional coded masks to encode the X-ray sky. Low noise electronics based on ASICS technology is the front-end read out. We present here the instrumental and astrophysical expected performances of SuperAGILE as derived by Monte Carlo simulations and experimental tests on a prototype of the silicon microstrip detector and front-end electronics.
- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #5
- Pub Date:
- October 2000
- Bibcode:
- 2000HEAD....5.4313C