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[16.17] The In-Flight Calibration Program for the XRS on Astro-E2

J. Cottam, C. A. Kilbourne (NASA/GSFC), XRS Instrument Team

The X-ray Spectrometer (XRS) will be launched in February 2005 as part of the Astro-E2 mission. It will provide unprecedented throughput and resolving powers particularly at high energies. In this presentation we will describe the in-flight calibration program. The energy scale of the XRS is a complex non-linear function of the noise and power conditions on the array. It will be calibrated empirically using the bright point sources, Capella and GX301-2. Ground calibration of the line spread function shows it to be almost perfectly Gaussian. The in-flight calibration is designed to verify this using the energy scale targets. The effective area curve of the XRS contains discrete edge structure from the mirrors, the optical blocking filters, and the microcalorimeter HgTe absorbers. The effective area calibration program will simultaneously measure these absorption edges and the global effective area properties using the relatively featureless sources 3C273 and Mrk421. Additional monitoring of any ice build up on the filters will be conducted using observations of the supernova remnants N132D and E0102.

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