8th HEAD Meeting, 8-11 September, 2004
Session 16 Missions, Instruments and Data Analysis
Poster, Thursday, September 9, 2004, 9:00am-10:00pm

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[16.09] Calibration of the Nuclear Compton Telescope Prototype Flight Instrument

J.D. Bowen, S.E. Boggs, W. Coburn, C.B. Wunderer, R.P. Lin (SSL/UCB), M.S. Amman, P.N. Luke (LBNL/UCB), M.T. Burks, W. Craig, N.W. Madden, K. Ziock (LLNL), D.M. Smith (Dept. of Physics, UCSC), P. von Ballmoos, P. Jean (CESR)

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is an array of 12 Ge strip detectors (GeDs) capable of 3D tracking of relevant photon interactions in the crystals. The telecope is designed to study astrophysical sources through spectroscopy, imaging, and timing. NCT is sensitive to sources of nuclear line emission in the .2 to 15 MeV range and polarized gamma-ray sources in the .2 to 2 MeV range. A prototype flight consisting of a 2-GeD instrument is scheduled for Spring 2005 to critically test the novel instrument technologies. In this paper we discuss our energy and depth calibration techniques and present the results. Measured detector efficiencies are presented, in addition to the energy, spatial, and resulting angular resolutions. Our electrode event-correlation methods are discussed, as well as our event reconstruction techniques. Please see the paper by Coburn et al (this meeting) for an overview of the balloon payload and navigation systems, as well as the detector electronics, data storage, and relay systems.


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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.