# A systematic analysis of the XMM-Newton background: III. Impact of the magnetospheric environment

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the magnetospheric environment influences the particle-induced background in X-ray telescopes, highlighting variations caused by different magnetospheric regions and the distance from Earth, which is crucial for future missions like Athena.

## Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of magnetospheric regions on the background detected by XMM-Newton, informing background modeling for Athena.

## Key findings

- Soft proton background varies with magnetospheric zones.
- Background levels increase with distance from Earth.
- Both flaring and low-intensity components show modest variation.

## Abstract

A detailed characterization of the particle induced background is fundamental for many of the scientific objectives of the Athena X-ray telescope, thus an adequate knowledge of the background that will be encountered by Athena is desirable. Current X-ray telescopes have shown that the intensity of the particle induced background can be highly variable. Different regions of the magnetosphere can have very different environmental conditions, which can, in principle, differently affect the particle induced background detected by the instruments. We present results concerning the influence of the magnetospheric environment on the background detected by EPIC instrument onboard XMM-Newton through the estimate of the variation of the in-Field-of-View background excess along the XMM-Newton orbit. An important contribution to the XMM background, which may affect the Athena background as well, comes from soft proton flares. Along with the flaring component a low-intensity component is also present. We find that both show modest variations in the different magnetozones and that the soft proton component shows a strong trend with the distance from Earth.