The Athena WFI Science Products Module

TL;DR

The Athena WFI Science Products Module is a secondary processing unit designed to analyze X-ray data in real-time, identifying transients and improving background characterization for enhanced scientific insights.

Contribution

This paper introduces the design and software algorithms of the SPM, a novel hardware-software system for real-time X-ray data analysis onboard Athena.

Findings

Preliminary hardware design of the SPM.

Development of algorithms for transient detection.

Enhanced background analysis capabilities.

Abstract

The Science Products Module (SPM), a US contribution to the Athena Wide Field Imager, is a highly capable secondary CPU that performs special processing on the science data stream. The SPM will have access to both accepted X-ray events and those that were rejected by the on-board event recognition processing. It will include two software modules. The Transient Analysis Module will perform on-board processing of the science images to identify and characterize variability of the prime target and/or detection of serendipitous transient X-ray sources in the field of view. The Background Analysis Module will perform more sophisticated flagging of potential background events as well as improved background characterization, making use of data that are not telemetered to the ground, to provide improved background maps and spectra. We present the preliminary design of the SPM hardware as well as a brief overview of the software algorithms under development.