JANUS is a NASA small explorer class mission which just completed phase A and was intended for a 2013 launch date. The primary science goals of JANUS are to use high redshift (6<z<12) gamma ray bursts and quasars to explore the formation history of the first stars in the early universe and to study contributions to reionization. The X-Ray Flash Monitor (XRFM) and the Near-IR Telescope (NIRT) are the two primary instruments on JANUS. XRFM has been designed to detect bright X-ray flashes (XRFs) and gamma ray bursts (GRBs) in the 1-20 keV energy band over a wide field of view (4 steradians), thus facilitating the detection of z>6 XRFs/GRBs, which can be further studied by other instruments. XRFM would use a coded mask aperture design with hybrid CMOS Si detectors. It would be sensitive to XRFs/GRBs with flux in excess of approximately 240 mCrab. The spacecraft is designed to rapidly slew to source positions following a GRB trigger from XRFM. XRFM instrument design parameters and science goals are presented in this paper.
@article{arxiv.0908.3005,
title = {The JANUS X-Ray Flash Monitor},
author = {A. D. Falcone and D. N. Burrows and S. Barthelmy and W. Chang and J. Fredley and M. Kelly and R. Klar and D. Palmer and S. Persyn and K. Reichard and P. Roming and E. Seifert and R. W. M. Smith and P. Wood and M. Zugger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.3005},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
submitted to Proc. SPIE, Vol. 7435 (2009), 7 pages, 8 figures