Radiation shielding study for the joint European X-ray Telescope focal plane Detectors

Abstract

The requirements, philosophy and implementation of inorbit radiation shielding for the Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) on-board the Joint European X-ray Telescope (JET-X) are described in detail. Relevant trade-offs between displacement damage, spectral degradation, instrument mass and mission lifetime are examined and a maximum permissible fluence at the CCDs derived. The calculations show that for the ambient JET-X radiation environment no benefit is obtained by increasing the shield thickness above 30 mm of aluminum due to the local production of cascade nucleons. However, a large flare of the August 1972 type will exceed the required maximum fluence by a factor of ∼ 2. In order to survive such a flare, a thicker shield is required. Because of mass constraints, JET-X will fly a composite shield composed of 20 mm of aluminum on the outside and 5 mm of tungsten on the inside. Such a shield is designed to ensure that the degradation in the CCD FWHM energy resolution is no more than 40% around the Fe line over the nominal two year mission lifetime (a factor of 2 x the intrinsic line broadening). The predicted degradation in energy resolution and the efficacy of the shield design has been recently verified by experiment (Owens et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth., A361 (1995) 602).