The Medium Energy (ME) X-ray telescope onboard the Insight-HXMT astronomy satellite

TL;DR

The ME X-ray telescope onboard Insight-HXMT is a sensitive instrument operating in 5-30 keV, featuring advanced detectors and collimators, designed for in-orbit X-ray background estimation and astrophysical observations.

Contribution

This paper details the design and performance characteristics of the ME telescope, including detector technology, field of view configurations, and energy resolution improvements.

Findings

Energy resolution ~3 keV at 17.8 keV

Time resolution 255 microseconds

Multiple FOV configurations for background estimation

Abstract

The Medium Energy X-ray telescope (ME) is one of the three main telescopes on board the Insight Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT) astronomy satellite. ME contains 1728 pixels of Si-PIN detectors sensitive in 5-30 keV with a total geometrical area of 952 cm2. Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips, VA32TA6, is used to achieve low power consumption and low readout noise. The collimators define three kinds of field of views (FOVs) for the telescope, 1{\deg}{\times}4{\deg}, 4{\deg}{\times}4{\deg}, and blocked ones. Combination of such FOVs can be used to estimate the in-orbit X-ray and particle background components. The energy resolution of ME is ~3 keV at 17.8 keV (FWHM) and the time resolution is 255 {\mu}s. In this paper, we introduce the design and performance of ME.