田代 信

We report the first results of the ground test of the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD) on board the Astro-E mission, by means of the newly developed Ground Support Equipment (GSE). Astro-E will be launched in 2000 by a Japanese M-V rocket. In order to verify the detector system during the limited time before launch, fast and versatile GSE is necessary. For this, we have developed a flexible test system based on nine VME I/O boards for a SUN workstation. These boards carry reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with 50,000 gates, together with 1 Mbyte SRAM devices tightly coupled to each FPGA device. As an application of using this GSE, we have tested the performance of a phoswich unit of the Flight Model of the HXD. In this paper, we present a schematic view of the GSE highlighting the functional design, and the results of our ground test of the HXD-sensor under the high count rate environment (approximately 10 kHz/unit) expected in orbit.

We present results of multiband analysis for 18 blazars observed with the X-ray satellite ASCA, half of which were also observed contemporaneously with EGRET instrument onboard Compton Gamma-ray Observatory (CGRO). Our multi-band analysis suggests that the magnetic field is 0.1 similar to 1 gauss. With these values of B, we estimate gamma(b) is 10(3) similar to 10(4) for quasar-hosted blazars (QHBs), and 10(5) for X-ray selected BL Lac objects (HBLs).

ASTRO-E is the fifth Japanese X-ray astronomy satellite scheduled to be launched in year 2000. The satellite will carry three scientific instruments, one of which is the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD). HXD will cover the 10-600 keV band with low background of several x 10(-6)c/s/cm(2)/keV. This will be achieved by the well-type phoswich counter technique together with large active shield counters of EGO (about 1200 cm(2)/side), which are also capable to detect GRBs in the 100-2000 keV band. About 100 GRBs are expected to be detected per year with HXD.