The ART-XC telescope on board the SRG observatory
Abstract
ART-XC (Astronomical Roentgen Telescope - X-ray Concentrator) is the hard X-ray instrument with grazing incidence imaging optics on board the Spektr-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory. The SRG observatory is the flagship astrophysical mission of the Russian Federal Space Program, which was successively launched into orbit around the second Lagrangian point (L2) of the Earth-Sun system with a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome on 13 July 2019. The ART-XC telescope will provide the first ever true imaging all-sky survey performed with grazing incidence optics in the 4-30 keV energy band and will obtain the deepest and sharpest map of the sky in the energy range of 4-12 keV. Observations performed during the early calibration and performance verification phase as well as during the on-going all-sky survey that started on 12 Dec. 2019 have demonstrated that the in-flight characteristics of the ART-XC telescope are very close to expectations based on the results of ground calibrations. Upon completion of its 4-year all-sky survey, ART-XC is expected to detect ~5000 sources (~3000 active galactic nuclei, including heavily obscured ones, several hundred clusters of galaxies, ~1000 cataclysmic variables and other Galactic sources), and to provide a high-quality map of the Galactic background emission in the 4-12 keV energy band. ART-XC is also well suited for discovering transient X-ray sources. In this paper, we describe the telescope, results of its ground calibrations, major aspects of the mission, the in-flight performance of ART-XC and first scientific results.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.12479,
title = {The ART-XC telescope on board the SRG observatory},
author = {M. Pavlinsky and A. Tkachenko and V. Levin and N. Alexandrovich and V. Arefiev and V. Babyshkin and O. Batanov and Yu. Bodnar and A. Bogomolov and A. Bubnov and M. Buntov and R. Burenin and I. Chelovekov and C. -T. Chen and T. Drozdova and S. Ehlert and E. Filippova and S. Frolov and D. Gamkov and S. Garanin and M. Garin and A. Glushenko and A. Gorelov and S. Grebenev and S. Grigorovich and P. Gureev and E. Gurova and R. Ilkaev and I. Katasonov and A. Krivchenko and R. Krivonos and F. Korotkov and M. Kudelin and M. Kuznetsova and V. Lazarchuk and I. Lomakin and I. Lapshov and V. Lipilin and A. Lutovinov and I. Mereminskiy and S. Molkov and V. Nazarov and V. Oleinikov and E. Pikalov and B. D. Ramsey and I. Roiz and A. Rotin and E. Sankin and A. Ryadov and S. Sazonov and D. Sedov and A. Semena and N. Semena and D. Serbinov and A. Shirshakov and A. Shtykovsky and A. Shvetsov and R. Sunyaev and D. A. Swartz and V. Tambov and V. Voron and A. Yaskovich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.12479},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
19 pages, 30 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics