金丸 善朗

Xtend is a soft x-ray imaging telescope developed for the x-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission (XRISM). XRISM is scheduled to be launched in the Japanese fiscal year 2022. Xtend consists of the soft x-ray imager (SXI), an x-ray CCD camera, and the x-ray mirror assembly (XMA), a thin-foil-nested conically approximated Wolter-I optics. The SXI uses the P-channel, back-illuminated type CCD with an imaging area size of 31mm on a side. The four CCD chips are arranged in a 2×2 grid and can be cooled down to -120 °C with a single-stage Stirling cooler. The XMA nests thin aluminum foils coated with gold in a confocal way with an outer diameter of 45 cm. A pre-collimator is installed in front of the x-ray mirror for the reduction of the stray light. Combining the SXI and XMA with a focal length of 5.6m, a field of view of 38′ × 38′ over the energy range from 0.4 to 13 keV is realized. We have completed the fabrication of the flight model of both SXI and XMA. The performance verification has been successfully conducted in a series of sub-system level tests. We also carried out on-ground calibration measurements and the data analysis is ongoing.

X-ray Imaging Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) is the next Japanese X-ray astronomical satellite to be launched in 2021 Japanese fiscal year. We are developing one of the XRISM instruments “Xtend”, which is an X-ray CCD camera combined with an X-ray telescope, and achieves the wide field of view of 38′×38′ in 0.4–13keV. In 2019, twelve flight-model (FM) candidate CCD chips were fabricated by Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. We conducted screening experiments to examine whether the FM candidates met requirements for the Xtend CCDs, and selected the four FM chips from them. We constructed a screening system, with which we can examine various CCD performances by illuminating characteristic X-ray lines in a ∼0.5–14keV band or optical lights. With this system, all the twelve candidates were confirmed to satisfy the requirements. We then selected four chips with the best performance, in terms of e.g., their charge transfer inefficiencies, energy resolutions, soft X-ray sensitivities, and optical light leakages. In this paper, we report an overview of the screening system, and procedures and results of the screening process.

We present experimental studies on the charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) of charge-coupled device (CCD) developed for the soft X-ray imaging telescope, Xtend, aboard the XRISM satellite. The CCD is equipped with a charge injection (CI) capability, in which sacrificial charge is periodically injected to fill the charge traps. By evaluating the re-emission of the trapped charge observed behind the CI rows, we find that there are at least three trap populations with different time constants. The traps with the shortest time constant, which is equivalent to a transfer time of approximately one pixel, are mainly responsible for the trailing charge of an X-ray event seen in the following pixel. A comparison of the trailing charge in two clocking modes reveals that the CTI depends not only on the transfer time but also on the area, namely the imaging or storage area. We construct a new CTI model by taking into account both transfer-time and area dependence. This model reproduces the data obtained in both clocking modes consistently. We also examine apparent flux dependence of the CTI observed without the CI technique. The higher incident X-ray flux is, the lower the CTI value becomes. It is due to a sacrificial charge effect by another X-ray photon. This effect is found to be negligible when the CI technique is used.

This paper reports on the development of on-chip pattern processing in the event-driven silicon-on-insulator pixel detector for X-ray astronomy with background rejection purpose. X-ray charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, well-established pixel detectors used in this field, has proven that classification of detected events considering their spatial pattern is effective for particle background rejection. Based on the current architecture of our device and from the CCD images obtained in space, we first established a design concept and algorithm of the pattern processor to be implemented. Then, we developed a new device, including a prototype pattern-processing circuit. Experiments using X-ray and beta-ray radioisotopes demonstrated that the pattern processor properly works as expected, and the particle background rejection is realized in an on-chip fashion. This function is useful, especially in a limited-resource system such as the CubeSat.