The X-ray CCD camera on Hitomi
Date: 02 February 2016
Satellite: Hitomi
Depicts: X-ray CCD camera
Copyright: JAXA
This photo shows the X-ray CCD camera at the core of the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) on the Hitomi satellite.
The Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) is a wide-field imaging system, receiving light from one of the two Soft X-ray Telescopes, SXT-1. The detector, an X-ray sensitive silicon CCD camera, records photons with energy between 0.4 keV and 12 keV and can operate at temperatures around 153 K.
The camera consists of a 2×2 array of back illuminated CCDs, each having an imaging area of 3 cm on a side, spanning 1280 pixels with a size of 24 μm each. Taking into account the 5.6-m focal length of the Soft X-ray Telescope, the resulting field of view is of 38' × 38', larger than those of ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray observatories.
Hitomi (known as ASTRO-H prior to launch) is a high-energy astrophysics space observatory, developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in collaboration with institutions in Japan, the US, Canada, and Europe.
