The Medium Energy X-ray telescope (ME) onboard the Insight-HXMT astronomy satellite

The Medium Energy X-ray telescope (ME) is one of the three main telescopes on board the Insight hard X-ray modulation telescope (Insight-HXMT) astronomy satellite. ME contains 1728 pixels of Si-PIN detectors sensitive in 5–30 keV with a total geometrical area of 952 cm². The application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip, VA32TA6, is used to achieve low power consumption and low readout noise. The collimators define three kinds of field of views (FOVs) for the telescope, 1°×4°, 4°×4°, and blocked ones. Combination of such FOVs can be used to estimate the in-orbit X-ray and particle background components. The energy resolution of ME is ~3 keV at 17.8 keV (FWHM) and the time resolution is 255 μs. In this paper, we introduce the design and performance of ME.