The soft gamma-ray detector (SGD) onboard ASTRO-H

Kazuo Makishima,Rie Sato,Kunishiro Mori,Shinya Saito,Hirokazu Odaka,Takao Kitaguchi,Shin Watanabe,Yoichi Yatsu,Yasuyuki Tanaka,Daisuke Yonetoku,Takeshi Nakamori,Takayuki Yuasa,Kouichi Hagino,Hideki Uchiyama,Takaaki Tanaka,Philippe Laurent,Yuto Ichinohe,Tadayuki Takahashi,Yasushi Fukazawa,J Katsuta ,Shin׳Ichiro Takeda ,H Takahashi ,G Madejski ,Y Terada ,A Goldwurm ,M Ohno ,T Nakano ,H Tajima ,F Lebrun ,M Kokubun ,Hideo Noda ,Katsuhiro Hayashi,M Ohta ,R D Blandford ,O Limousin ,T Mizuno ,K Yamaoka ,T Enoto ,Y Uchiyama ,G Sato ,J Kataoka ,K Nakazawa

doi:10.1117/12.2231962

Abstract

The Soft Gamma-ray Detector (SGD) is one of science instruments onboard ASTRO-H (Hitomi) and features a wide energy band of 60{600 keV with low backgrounds. SGD is an instrument with a novel concept of Narrow Compton camera where Compton kinematics is utilized to reject backgrounds which are inconsistent with the field-of-view defined by the active shield. After several years of developments, the flight hardware was fabricated and subjected to subsystem tests and satellite system tests. After a successful ASTRO-H (Hitomi) launch on February 17, 2016 and a critical phase operation of satellite and SGD in-orbit commissioning, the SGD operation was moved to the nominal observation mode on March 24, 2016. The Compton cameras and BGO-APD shields of SGD worked properly as designed. On March 25, 2016, the Crab nebula observation was performed, and, the observation data was successfully obtained.

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