The Science Products Module (SPM), a US contribution to the Athena Wide Field Imager, is a highly capable secondary CPU that performs special processing on the science data stream. The SPM will have access to both accepted X-ray events and those that were rejected by the on-board event recognition processing. It will include two software modules. The Transient Analysis Module will perform on-board processing of the science images to identify and characterize variability of the prime target and/or detection of serendipitous transient X-ray sources in the field of view. The Background Analysis Module will perform more sophisticated flagging of potential background events as well as improved background characterization, making use of data that are not telemetered to the ground, to provide improved background maps and spectra. We present the preliminary design of the SPM hardware as well as a brief overview of the software algorithms under development.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1808.02883,
title = {The Athena WFI Science Products Module},
author = {David N. Burrows and Steven Allen and Marshall Bautz and Esra Bulbul and Julia Erdley and Abraham D. Falcone and Stanislav Fort and Catherine E. Grant and Sven Herrmann and Jamie Kennea and Robert Klar and Ralph Kraft and Adam Mantz and Eric D. Miller and Paul Nulsen and Steve Persyn and Pragati Pradhan and Dan Wilkins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.02883},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
proceedings of Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2018: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray (10699-54)