SAX: Concentrator/Spectrometer (C/S)

This is only a general description of the instrument. Please, refer to the Instrument Home Pages for updated information.

• Specially designed double cone mirror systems are used in the C/S to concentrate X-rays below 10 keV, producing a similar result to an ordinary telescope with visible light. To concentrate in X-rays, each mirror is gold coated to maximize its reflectivity and allows only X-rays, incident at very small angles to its surface, to be reflected to its focal point.
  

• SAX has four mirror units, each containing 30 co-focal mirrors. The X-ray sky in the field of view of each mirror unit is projected to its focal plane, where the image is recorded by a gas scintillation proportional counter.
• Each gas scintillation proportional counter consists of a gas cell containing one atmosphere of Xenon and has an entrance window of high transparency to X-rays. Inside the cell the energy of each X-ray which interacts in the gas is converted to a pulse of light which is seen by a photomultiplier tube from whose signals can be derived the position of arrival of the X-ray and its energy. Thus the X-ray spectra and positions of celestial X-ray sources in the field of view can be obtained.
• SAX has three X-ray telescopes in the 1-10 keV energy range - the Medium Energy Concentrator/Spectrometer MECS - and one X-ray telescope in the 0.1-10 keV energy range - the Low Energy Concentrator/Spectrometer LECS. The C/S has a field of view of 30 arcmin and an angular resolution of 1 arcmin.

This file was last modified on Wednesday, 02-Sep-1998 17:28:55 CEST by Mauro Orlandini