The joint JAXA/NASA ASTRO-H mission is the sixth in a series of highly successful X-ray missions initiated
by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). ASTRO-H will investigate the physics of the
high-energy universe by performing high-resolution, high-throughput spectroscopy with moderate angular
resolution. ASTRO-H covers very wide energy range from 0.3 keV to 600 keV. ASTRO-H allows a combination
of wide band X-ray spectroscopy (5-80 keV) provided by multilayer coating, focusing hard X-ray
mirrors and hard X-ray imaging detectors, and high energy-resolution soft X-ray spectroscopy (0.3-12 keV)
provided by thin-foil X-ray optics and a micro-calorimeter array. The mission will also carry an X-ray CCD
camera as a focal plane detector for a soft X-ray telescope (0.4-12 keV) and a non-focusing soft gamma-ray
detector (40-600 keV) . The micro-calorimeter system is developed by an international collaboration led
by ISAS/JAXA and NASA. The simultaneous broad bandpass, coupled with high spectral resolution of
ΔE ~7 eV provided by the micro-calorimeter will enable a wide variety of important science themes to be
pursued.
The Hard X-ray Imager (HXI) is one of three focal plane detectors on board the NeXT (New exploration X-ray
Telescope) mission, which is scheduled to be launched in 2013. By use of the hybrid structure composed of
double-sided silicon strip detectors and a cadmium telluride strip detector, it fully covers the energy range of
photons collected with the hard X-ray telescope up to 80 keV with a high quantum efficiency. High spatial
resolutions of 400 micron pitch and energy resolutions of 1-2 keV (FWMH) are at the same time achieved with
low noise front-end ASICs. In addition, thick BGO active shields compactly surrounding the main detection
part, as a heritage of the successful performance of the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD) on board Suzaku satellite,
enable to achive an extremely high background reduction for the cosmic-ray particle background and in-orbit
activation. The current status of hardware development including the design requirement, expected performance,
and technical readinesses of key technologies are summarized.
We developed the new readout system for the pixel-readout μ-PIC (micro pixel chamber), which is one of the micro-pattern gas detectors that have been developed as a X-ray polarimeter so far. By using this system, we succeeded in achieving the sensitivity predicted by the simulation, i.e, the modulation factors, which is one of the most important factors for X-ray polarimeter as defined later in this paper, 0.24±0.08 at 8 keV, 0.18±0.07 at 15 keV in the neon-based gas mixture, and 0.18±0.04 in the argon-based gas although there still remain problems such as the pitch size among pixels and the non-uniformity of the response.
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