A Hard X-Ray Imaging Instrument For Solar And Cosmic Sources

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Abstract
A Hard X-Ray Imaging Instrument is described which is capable of high resolution imaging of solar and cosmic hard X-ray sources between 2 and 80 kev during Shuttle sortie flights. The properties of solar burst sources and the resulting instrument requirements are discussed. The instrument envelope of 1.2 x 1.2 x 3.0 meters includes a tungsten multigrid collimator which has 4" resolution, a 40' response envelope and a point source effective area of 26 cm2. A combination of periodic fan beans and non-periodic pencil beams enable a unique deconvolution to be achieved within a 128" x 128" field without mechanical scanning. The detector system is a set of direct-readout 40 atm-cm Xenon-filled proportional counters, designed to minimize background. The instrument is capable of refurbishment to optimize the collimator configuration for specific solar or cosmic scientific objectives, to upgrade the angular resolution or to extend the high energy response.

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