Instrument design and detector development for high energy astrophysics at CASS

UCSD instrumentation on previous high energy astrophysics missions:

• Orbiting Solar Observatory 7 (1971-1974).
• HEAO-1 A4: UCSD/MIT Hard X-ray/Low Energy Gamma-Ray Experiment on the 1st High Energy Astrophysics Observatory (1977-1979).

UCSD instrumentation on current high energy astrophysics missions

• HEXTE: High Energy X-ray Timing Experiment on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (1996-)
• BATSE: Burst and Transient Source Experiment spectral detectors) on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (1990-)

Proposed instrumentation:

• The Continuous Hard X-ray Imager for Astrophysics,
  by a collaboration of CASS scientists and engineers,
  published in Proc. SPIE 1258, 13.
  NASA solicited proposals for the next generation of orbiting observatories. This is our proposal, to use a new strip-detector technology (CdZnTe) to provide the first imaging all-sky survey in the 10-100 keV band.

• High Energy X-ray Imaging Survey (HEXIS)

Related links of interest elsewhere (suggestions welcome!):

• Amptek X-ray instrumentation
• Coded aperture imaging WWW page at the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics
• GEANT detector description and simulation tool. (Newsgroup).

Other proposed high energy astrophysics missions:

• NASA/GSFC's list of winning high energy astrophysics mission concepts
• ALLEGRO (All sky low energy gamma-ray observatory) - a MIDEX proposal from Northwestern University.
• Andromeda - a small gamma-ray burst detector proposed by the Space Radiation Laboratory at Caltech.
• BLAST (Burst Location with an Arcsecond Telescope) - a MIDEX proposal from the Naval Research Laboratory.
• CATSAT -a STEDI proposal for a gamma-ray burst mission.
• GLAST - a 10 MeV to 300 GeV Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, a proposed NASA astrophysics concept from Stanford.

Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences