The GLAST Large Area Telescope Detector Performance Monitoring

Abstract

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is one of two instruments on board the Gamma‐ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST), the next generation high energy gamma‐ray space telescope. The LAT contains sixteen identical towers in a four‐by‐four grid. Each tower contains a silicon‐strip tracker and a CsI calorimeter that together will give the incident direction and energy of the pair‐converting photon in the energy range 20 MeV – 300 GeV. In addition, the instrument is covered by a finely segmented Anti‐Coincidence Detector (ACD) to reject charged particle background. Altogether, the LAT contains more than 864k channels in the trackers, 1536 CsI crystals and 97 ACD plastic scintillator tiles and ribbons. Here we detail some of the strategies and methods for how we are planning to monitor the instrument performance on orbit. It builds on the extensive experience gained from Integration & Test and Commissioning of the instrument on ground.