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Cooling out the radiation damage on the XMM-Newton EPIC MOS CCDs
Altieri, B.; Bennie, P. J.; Turner, M. J. L. +2 more
The X-ray astronomy satellite XMM-Newton has been in an orbit taking it through the trapped radiation belts and direct solar proton flux during the peak of the current solar cycle for over two and a half years. The MOS CCD detectors (E2V CCD22's) have degraded in charge transfer efficiency (CTE) as a result of damage created by high energy protons…
pnCCDs on XMM-Newton—42 months in orbit
Haberl, Frank; Freyberg, Michael; Dennerl, Konrad +11 more
XMM-Newton—a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency's Horizon 2000 programme—was launched on December 10, 1999 into orbit. Since March 2000 more than 2000 scientific observations were made. An example will be shown. The X-ray pnCCD camera on EPIC is operating since then without severe problems. We will report about the system performance…
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)
Usoskin, I.; Laitinen, T.; Valtonen, E. +199 more
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a large acceptance ( 0.65 sr m 2) detector designed to operate in the International Space Station (ISS) for three years. The purposes of the experiment are to search for cosmic antimatter and dark matter and to study the composition and energy spectrum of the primary cosmic rays. A "scaled-down" …
PICsIT: a position sensitive detector for space applications
Di Cocco, G.; Malaguti, G.; Schiavone, F. +8 more
Pixellated Imaging CsI Telescope (PICsIT) is the high energy detector plane of Imager on Board INTEGRAL Satellite (IBIS), one of the main instruments on board the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellite that will be launched in the year 2001. It consists of 4096 CsI(Tl) individual detector elements and operates in the …
Direct measurement of sub-pixel structure of the EPIC MOS CCD on-board the XMM//NEWTON satellite
Bennie, P. J.; Turner, M. J. L.; Abbey, A. F. +3 more
We have used a mesh experiment in order to measure the sub-pixel structure of the EPIC MOS CCDs on-board the XMM/NEWTON satellite. The EPIC MOS CCDs have 40 µm-square pixels which have an open electrode structure in order to improve the detection efficiency for low-energy X-rays. We obtained restored pixel images for various X-ray event grad…
Novel pixel detectors for X-ray astronomy and other applications
Strüder, L.; Lutz, G.; Richter, R. H.
Following previous work in particle physics, the MPI Semiconductor Laboratory has been founded with the purpose of developing novel semiconductor detectors for particle physics and X-ray astronomy. A short description of the already successfully concluded development of pn-CCDs for focal imaging in X-ray astronomy (XMM//Newton X-ray Observatory) i…
High-resolution imaging X-ray spectrometers
Strüder, L.
The successful commissioning of the XMM-Newton focal plane detectors, radiation hard X-ray imaging spectroscopic CCDs, has attracted some attention: Reliably operating X-ray CCDs are delivering extraordinary images, recorded in a single-photon counting mode, imaged through the largest X-ray telescope ever built. The experimental boundary condition…
The quantum efficiency of pn-detectors from the near infrared to the soft X-ray region
Hartmann, R.; Stephan, K. -H.; Strüder, L.
The quantum efficiency of back-illuminated silicon pn-junction detectors is evaluated in the spectral range from 1.2 to 1400 eV, comprising the near infrared, visible, ultraviolet and soft X-ray regions. The calibrations are performed with the same device over the entire measured range, thus eliminating technological variations of the entrance win…
Particle and X-ray damage in pn-CCDs
Meidinger, Norbert; Schmalhofer, Bernhard; Strüder, Lothar
The fully depleted pn-junction charge coupled device (pn-CCD) has been developed as a detector for X-ray imaging and high-resolution spectroscopy for the X-ray satellite missions XMM and ABRIXAS. If the detector is exposed to a particle radiation environment, the energy resolution is degraded due to charge transfer losses and a dark current increa…
Modeling the energy response of pn-CCDs in the 0.2-10 keV band
Hartmann, R.; Strüder, L.; Krause, N. +5 more
A simple analytical model has been developed to explain the shape of low-energy spectra taken with pn-CCDs, which are developed as imaging spectroscopic detectors for ESA's X-ray observatory satellite X-Ray Multimirror Mission (XMM). The model has been tested on experimental data taken with test devices at the German synchrotron Berliner Elektrone…