Recent progress in the ground calibration of the ASTRO-H Hard X-ray telescope (HXT-2)

The 6th Japanese X-ray satellite, ASTRO-H, equips two Hard X-ray Telescopes (HXTs) to perform imaging spectroscopy up to 70 keV. The 2nd flight module (HXT-2) had been completed in July, 2013. After some environmental tests were passed, the X-ray performance of the HXT-2 was measured at the SPring-8 BL20B2, 3rd generation synchrotron facility. The angular resolution defined with a Half Power Diameter (HPD) was 1:′9 at 30 keV and 1:′8 at 50 keV. This small energy dependence is considered to be caused by the difference in image quality of each foil; the inner mirror shells have better quality than outer ones. The effective area was found to be 178 cm2 at 30 keV and 82 cm2 at 50 keV, both of which exceed the requirement. Furthermore, the detailed energy dependence of the effective area was examined for a limited aperture in the 30{70 keV band with a pitch of 1 keV. We also measured the off-axis dependence of the effective area at 50 keV, and then determined the optical axis. The field of view of the HXT-2 was found to be 5:′6 (FWHM of the vignetting function), consistent with the simulation. In this paper, we also report the detailed analysis of the ground calibration data, which will be used for image reconstruction by a ray-tracing simulator.

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