A laboratory test setup to study the stability of operation of the CdTe detectors within Astro-H HXI

摘要

Astro-H is a JAXA/NASA X-ray satellite launched in 17th Feb. 2016. The hard X-ray imager (HXI) is a Si/CdTe stacked detector system which is placed in the focus of a hard x-ray telescope. HXI constitute one of the four different instruments onboard Astro-H. We are presenting the current status of a stacked detector setup which consists of two mini-HXI double sided CdTe strip detectors (CdTe DSDs)--similar to those used in HXI--that are read out with the low-noise readout ASIC IDeF-X BD. We describe the configuration of the setup, its spectroscopic performance, and a long-term operation of the setup. The long-term test simulates the orbital operation of HXI using identical detector temperatures, bias voltages, and switch-on/switch-off cycles with the goal to study the detector stability and the evolution of its performance during operation.