In flight energy calibration and gain corrections for the hard X- and soft gamma-ray telescope Sigma

Abstract

The French soft γ-ray coded mask imaging telescope on board Soviet spacecraft GRANAT has experienced some unexpected gain drifts during its operation in the space. This gain instability seriously affected its data analysis and scientific interpretation of the results. After a detailed study of its background spectra and the long term performance of the detector, we have identified several background features which enable us to perform the in flight energy calibrations and gain corrections for the observations. The precision of such an energy calibration is estimated to be in the order of 0.5%, which is accurate enough for all types of data analysis such as spectrum de-convolution, and summation of observation spectra. More importantly it makes the search of astrophysical line features in the spectrum possible.