Published July 24, 2014 | Version Published + Submitted
Book Section - Chapter Open

In-flight PSF calibration of the NuSTAR hard X-ray optics

Abstract

We present results of the point spread function (PSF) calibration of the hard X-ray optics of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). Immediately post-launch, NuSTAR has observed bright point sources such as Cyg X-1, Vela X-1, and Her X-1 for the PSF calibration. We use the point source observations taken at several off-axis angles together with a ray-trace model to characterize the in-orbit angular response, and find that the ray-trace model alone does not fit the observed event distributions and applying empirical corrections to the ray-trace model improves the fit significantly. We describe the corrections applied to the ray-trace model and show that the uncertainties in the enclosed energy fraction (EEF) of the new PSF model is (approximately less than) 3% for extraction apertures of R (approximately greater than) 60″ with no significant energy dependence. We also show that the PSF of the NuSTAR optics has been stable over a period of ~300 days during its in-orbit operation.

Additional Information

© 2014 SPIE. Date Published: 24 July 2014. This work was supported under NASA Contract No. NNG08FD60C, and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA).

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Published - An_2014p91141Q.pdf

Submitted - 1406.7419v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
58212
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20150612-100131748

Related works

Funding

NASA
NNG08FD60C
NASA/JPL/Caltech

Dates

Created
2015-06-13
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
NuSTAR, Space Radiation Laboratory
Series Name
Proceedings of SPIE
Series Volume or Issue Number
9144
Other Numbering System Name
Space Radiation Laboratory
Other Numbering System Identifier
2014-43