CALIBRATION OF THE NuSTAR HIGH-ENERGY FOCUSING X-RAY TELESCOPE

Journal Article · Tue Sep 15 04:00:00 EDT 2015 · Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0067-0049/220/1/8· OSTI ID:22520144

Madsen, Kristin K.; Harrison, Fiona A.; Grefenstette, Brian W.; Miyasaka, Hiromasa; Forster, Karl; Fuerst, Felix; Rana, Vikram; Walton, Dominic J. ^[1]; Markwardt, Craig B. ^[2]; An, Hongjun ^[3]; Bachetti, Matteo ^[4]; Kitaguchi, Takao ^[5]; Bhalerao, Varun ^[6]; Boggs, Steve; Craig, William W. ^[7]; Christensen, Finn E. ^[8]; Hailey, Charles J. ^[9]; Perri, Matteo; Puccetti, Simonetta ^[10]; Stern, Daniel ^[11] ; others, and

---

1. Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
2. Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
3. Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T8 (Canada)
4. Université de Toulouse, UPS-OMP, IRAP, Toulouse (France)
5. RIKEN, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama, 351-0198 (Japan)
6. Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411007 (India)
7. Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
8. DTU Space, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Elektronvej 327, DK-2800 Lyngby (Denmark)
9. Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, NY 10027 (United States)
10. ASI Science Data Center, via Galileo Galilei, I-00044, Frascati (Italy)
11. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)

We present the calibration of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) X-ray satellite. We used the Crab as the primary effective area calibrator and constructed a piece-wise linear spline function to modify the vignetting response. The achieved residuals for all off-axis angles and energies, compared to the assumed spectrum, are typically better than ±2% up to 40 keV and 5%–10% above due to limited counting statistics. An empirical adjustment to the theoretical two-dimensional point-spread function (PSF) was found using several strong point sources, and no increase of the PSF half-power diameter has been observed since the beginning of the mission. We report on the detector gain calibration, good to 60 eV for all grades, and discuss the timing capabilities of the observatory, which has an absolute timing of ±3 ms. Finally, we present cross-calibration results from two campaigns between all the major concurrent X-ray observatories (Chandra, Swift, Suzaku, and XMM-Newton), conducted in 2012 and 2013 on the sources 3C 273 and PKS 2155-304, and show that the differences in measured flux is within ∼10% for all instruments with respect to NuSTAR.

• OSTI ID: 22520144
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 220; ISSN 0067-0049; ISSN APJSA2
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES
CALIBRATION
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
GAIN
POINT SOURCES
SATELLITES
SPACE VEHICLES
SPLINE FUNCTIONS
STATISTICS
TELESCOPE COUNTERS
TELESCOPES
TWO-DIMENSIONAL SYSTEMS
X RADIATION
X-RAY DETECTION