Performance of the NuSTAR Focal Plane Detectors
Abstract
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a Small Explorer mission that will carry the first focusing hard X-ray telescope into orbit. NuSTAR, scheduled for launch in February 2012, will provide an improvement in the hard x-ray sensitivity in the hard X-ray (5 - 80 keV) band band by orders of magnitude over previous satellites. NuSTAR is composed of two co-aligned focal planes, each of which contains a set of a four 32x32 pixel Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride (CZT) detectors, each of which has gone through a rigorous calibration campaign to determine the energy and spatial response to incident X-rays. These calibration data are combined with the photon-by-photon readout of the CZT detectors to allow us to accurately reconstruct the energy and position. In this paper we describe the performance of the focal plane detectors during the ground calibration campaign and discuss the implications for the science performance of NuSTAR.
- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #12
- Pub Date:
- September 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011HEAD...12.4310G