Science test equipment for the INTEGRAL PICsIT instrument

The IBIS instrument is a telescope designed to produce imags of the high-energy sky with an angular resolution of several arcminutes over a wide field of view. This is obtained by use of a coded aperture in conjunction with two separate position sensitive detection planes. The upper layer, ISGRI consists of 16384 CdTe elements and operates between 15 and 600 keV, while the underlying layer PICsIT comprises 8 identical modules housing altogether 4096 CsI(TI) scintillating crystals coupled to PIN photodiodes and functions between 0.15 an 10 MeV. The PICsIT Science Test Equipment has been designed in order to support the functional, environmental and calibration tests of the PICsIT detector at all test levels, including when the PICsIT module is integrate din the IBIS instrument and, afterwards, when IBIS itself is integrated in the spacecraft. To this end, the system has been distributed over two workstations: the On-line Science Console and the Off-line Science Console. The On-line Science Console manages the interfacing with the equipment which commands and acquires the data from the instrument, the near-real time acquisition unpacking and storage of the instrument data, and also allows the operator to continuously monitor the calibration procedure from a scientific point of view. The Off-line Science Console allows the operator to perform more detailed investigations of the instrument performances. The system as implemented for the Engineering Model test and calibration and the current status of the project are described.