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[50.01] The Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey Telescope (EXIST): Instrument Design Concepts

W. W. Craig (SLAC-LLNL), J. S. Hong (Harvard University), EXIST Team

We present instrument design concepts for the EXIST mission, a candidate for the Black Hole Finder Probe, part of NASA's Beyond Einstein Program. Two of the primary mission drivers are high sensitivity (~ 0.05 mCrab in the 10-150 keV for the mission's all-sky survey) and good source localization. Instrument concepts currently under study use two systems to satisfy these requirements. A high energy (HE) telescope array would employ a large area (6 m²) of CZT detectors, covering a ~ 60^o x 130^o instantaneous field of view . A separate low energy (LE) system would use a large array (1m²) of Si strip or pixel detectors to cover a ~60^o x 110^o instantaneous field of view. With this approach, the HE system would locate black holes including highly obscured AGNs. For the stronger sources, the LE system would localize positions to ~ 10 arcseconds to allow follow-up observations. The combined broad spectral coverage (~ 5 to > 300 keV) provides excellent overlap with other missions such as Constellation-X. The EXIST instruments have good timing resolution (<~ 1ms). This, combined with the large field of view which is scanned across the entire sky once per orbit, will provide exciting insights into the temporal variations of sources over a wide range of time scales.

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.