The in-orbit performance of the Exosat gas scintillation proportional counter
Manzo, G.; Taylor, B. G.; Peacock, A.; White, N.; Courvoisier, T.
Netherlands, Germany, Italy
Abstract
The European X-ray observatory satellite Exosat, launched in May 1983, carries a scientific payload of four instruments designed to study the properties of cosmic X-ray sources. The present investigation is concerned with one of these instruments, taking into account the gas scintillation proportional counter (GSPC) spectrometer. Attention is given to the spherical electric field detector of the GSPC, the GSPC characteristics, the observatory orbital characteristics, the spectrometer's background, the detector's response, the effective area of the Exosat GSPC spectrometer as a function of incident photon energy, the X-ray spectrum of Cygnus X-3, and the variation of the detector gain and the gain change compared to the expected gain with X-ray photon energy.