Ground-based x-ray calibration of the Astro-H/Hitomi soft x-ray telescopes

Abstract

We present the summary of the on-ground calibration of two soft x-ray telescopes (SXT-I and SXT-S), developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), onboard Astro-H/Hitomi. After the initial x-ray measurements with a diverging beam at the GSFC 100-m beamline, we performed the full calibration of the x-ray performance, using the 30-m x-ray beamline facility at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Japan. We adopted a raster scan method with a narrow x-ray pencil beam with a divergence of ∼15″. The on-axis effective area (EA), half-power diameter, and vignetting function were measured at several energies between 1.5 and 17.5 keV. The detailed results appear in tables and figures in this paper. We measured and evaluated the performance of the SXT-S and the SXT-I with regard to the detector-limited field-of-view and the pixel size of the paired flight detector, i.e., SXS and the SXI, respectively. The primary items measured are the EA, image quality, and stray light for on-axis and off-axis sources. The accurate measurement of these parameters is vital to make the precise response function of the ASTRO-H SXTs. This paper presents the definitive results of the ground-based calibration of the ASTRO-H SXTs.