Purpose: The High-Energy X-ray telescope (HE), one of the three main payloads of the \textit{Insight}-HXMT mission, is composed of eighteen NaI(Tl)/CsI(Na) phoswich detectors, where NaI(Tl) serves as the primary detector covering 20--250\,keV, and CsI(Na) is used as an active shield detector to suppress the background of NaI(Tl) and also serves as an all-sky gamma-ray burst monitor covering 0.2--3\,MeV. In this paper, we review the in-orbit performance of HE in the first 5 years since \textit{Insight}-HXMT was launched on June 15, 2017. Methods: The major performances we concern include the gain and energy resolution of NaI(Tl) and CsI(Na) detectors, the performance of pulse-shape-discriminator (PSD) and system dead-time. In this work, we investigate these performances mainly using the data of blank-sky observations and the data when the telescope in earth occultation. Results: The overall performance of HE/NaI(Tl) is very stable in the first 5 years, whereas the gain of HE/CsI(Na) shows a continuously increasing trend and should be calibrated regularly. Conclusion: In general, HE is still in good health and well-calibrated status after five-year's operation. The in-orbit performance of HE has no significant deviation from expectation. HE is expected to be in operation healthily for another several years of extended mission life.
@article{arxiv.2302.03859,
title = {In-orbit performance of HE onboard Insight-HXMT in the first 5 years},
author = {Xu-Fang Li and Cong-Zhan Liu and Yi-Fei Zhang and Xiao-Bo Li and Zheng-Wei Li and Xue-Feng Lu and Zhi Chang and Ming-Yu Ge and Juan Zhang and Yu-Peng Xu and Fang-Jun Lu and Li-Ming Song and Shuang-Nan Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.03859},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
19 pages, 16 figures, Accepted by Insight-HXMT special issue on RDTM