A balloon-borne imaging telescope for high-energy astrophysics

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Balloon-Borne Instruments, Coding, Gamma Ray Telescopes, Masking, Radiation Measuring Instruments, X Ray Telescopes, Doped Crystals, Image Enhancement, Pointing Control Systems, Scintillation Counters, Sodium Iodides

Scientific paper

We describe an imaging telescope for observations of celestial sources in the energy range between 30 keV and 1.8 MeV onboard stratospheric balloons. The detector is a 41 cm diameter, 5 cm thick Nal(TI) crystal coupled to 19 photomultipliers in an Anger camera configuration. It is surrounded by a plastic scintillator 15 cm thick on the sides, 0.2 cm thick at the top and 20 cm thick at the bottom. The imaging device is based upon a 19 x 19 element square MURA (Modified Uniformly Redundant Array) coded mask mounted in an one-piece mask-antimask configuration. The detector's spatial resolution is about 10 mm at 100 keV. This is the first experiment to use such a mask pattern and configuration for astrophysical purposes. The expected 3 sigma sensitivity for an on-axis source observed for 104 s at a residual atmosphere of 3.5 g per sq cm is 1.44 x 10-5 photons per sq cm/s/keV at 100 keV and 1.00 x 10-6 photons per sq cm/s/keV at 1 MeV. The angular resolution is approximately 14 arcminutes over a 13 deg field of view. The instrument is mounted in an automatic platform with a capability for pointing and stabilization in both azimuth and elevation axis with 2 arcmin accuracy.

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