Abstract
We report the first results of the ground test of the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD) on board the Astro-E mission, by means of the newly developed Ground Support Equipment (GSE). Astro-E will be launched in 2000 by a Japanese M-V rocket. In order to verify the detector system during the limited time before launch, fast and versatile GSE is necessary. For this, we have developed a flexible test system based on nine VME I/O boards for a SUN workstation. These boards carry reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with 50,000 gates, together with 1 Mbyte SRAM devices tightly coupled to each FPGA device. As an application of using this GSE, we have tested the performance of a phoswich unit of the Flight Model of the HXD. In this paper, we present a schematic view of the GSE highlighting the functional design, and the results of our ground test of the HXD-sensor under the high count rate environment (approximately 10 kHz/unit) expected in orbit.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 143-154 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering |
| Volume | 3445 |
| Publication status | Published - 1998 Dec 1 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on EUV, X-Ray, and Gamma-Ray Instrumentation for Astronomy IX - San Diego, CA, USA Duration: 1998 Jul 22 → 1998 Jul 24 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Computer Science Applications
- Applied Mathematics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering