Report on the Brazilian Scientific Balloon Program
Abstract
We report on the recent scientific ballooning activities in Brazil and present plans for the next few years. Recent technological developments, especially on telecommunications and gondola attitude control systems, will be reported. We also present the recent progress achieved in the development of the protoMIRAX balloon experiment. protoMIRAX is a balloon-borne hard X-ray coded X-ray imaging telescope under development at INPE as a pathfinder for the MIRAX (Monitor e Imageador de Raios X) satellite mission. The experiment consists essentially in a hard X-ray coded-aperture imager to operate in the 20-200 keV energy range. The detector plane is a square array of 196 10mm x 10mm x 2mm CdZnTe (CZT) planar detectors. A collimator defines a fully-coded field-of-view of $20^\circ\times 20^\circ$, with $7^\circ\times 7^\circ$ of full sensitivity and an angular resolution of 1.7$^\circ$. We describe the final stages of development and testing of the front-end electronics customized for these detectors, as well as tests of the imaging system. We show detailed Monte Carlo simulations of the flight background and the expected flight images of bright sources made with the use of GEANT4.
- Publication:
-
43rd COSPAR Scientific Assembly. Held 28 January - 4 February
- Pub Date:
- January 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021cosp...43E2294B