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Spectral performance of the Microchannel X-ray Telescope on board the SVOM mission

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Abstract

The Microchannel X-ray Telescope (MXT) is an innovative compact X-ray instrument on board the SVOM astronomical mission dedicated to the study of transient phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts. During 3 weeks, we have tested the MXT flight model at the Panter X-ray test facility under the nominal temperature and vacuum conditions that MXT will undergo in-flight. We collected data at series of characteristic energies probing the entire MXT energy range, from 0.28 keV up to 9 keV, for multiple source positions with the center of the point spread function (PSF) inside and outside the detector field of view (FOV). We stacked the data of the positions with the PSF outside the FOV to obtain a uniformly illuminated matrix and reduced all data sets using a dedicated pipeline. We determined the best spectral performance of MXT using an optimized data processing, especially for the energy calibration and the charge sharing effect induced by the pixel low energy thresholding. Our results demonstrate that MXT is compliant with the instrument requirement regarding the energy resolution (< 80 eV at 1.5 keV), the low and high energy threshold, and the accuracy of the energy calibration (± 20 eV). We also determined the charge transfer inefficiency (\(\sim 10^{-5}\)) of the detector and modeled its evolution with energy prior to the irradiation that MXT will undergo during its in-orbit lifetime. Finally, we measured the relation of the energy resolution as function of the photon energy. We determined an equivalent noise charge of \(4.9 \pm 0.2 \ \mathrm {e}^{-}_{\text {rms}}\) for the MXT detection chain and a Fano factor of 0.131 ± 0.003 in silicon at 208 K, in agreement with previous works. This campaign confirmed the promising scientific performance that MXT will be able to deliver during the mission lifetime.

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Notes

  1. https://www.mpe.mpg.de/heg/panter

  2. http://www.astropy.org

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the people from CNES, CEA, MPE, IJCLab and the University of Leicester involved in the operations of the MXT instrument during the Panter calibration test campaign. We also thank O. Limousin and Y. Gutierrez for helpful discussions and advice about ECC. This research made use of Astropy,Footnote 2 a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy [2, 3], of matplotlib, a Python library for publication quality graphics [17] and of NumPy [16].

Funding

This work was funded by the French Space Agency (CNES), with the contribution of MPE, CEA, CNRS and the University of Leicester.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    B. Schneider, N. Renault-Tinacci, D. Götz, A. Meuris, P. Ferrando, E. Doumayrou & T. Lavanant

  2. Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, 85748, Garching, Germany

    V. Burwitz & N. Meidinger

  3. Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, 18 avenue Edouard Belin, 31400, Toulouse, France

    K. Mercier

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  1. B. Schneider
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  2. N. Renault-Tinacci
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  3. D. Götz
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  4. A. Meuris
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  5. P. Ferrando
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  6. V. Burwitz
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  8. T. Lavanant
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  9. N. Meidinger
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  10. K. Mercier
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception, design and data collection. Material preparation and analysis were performed by B. Schneider, N. Renault-Tinacci, D. Götz, A. Meuris and P. Ferrando. The first draft of the manuscript was written by B. Schneider and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to B. Schneider.

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All data analyzed during this study were collected at the MPE Panter facility and are part of the SVOM/MXT project.

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Schneider, B., Renault-Tinacci, N., Götz, D. et al. Spectral performance of the Microchannel X-ray Telescope on board the SVOM mission. Exp Astron 56, 77–97 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-022-09886-1

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