Indian payloads (RT-2 Experiment) onboard CORONAS-PHOTON mission

Abstract

RT-2 Experiment (RT - Roentgen Telescope) is a low energy gamma-ray instrument which is designed and developed as a part of Indo-Russian collaborative project of CORONAS-PHOTON Mission to study the Solar flares in wide energy band of electromagnetic spectrum ranging from UV to high-energy γ-rays (~ 2000 MeV). RT-2 instruments will cover the energy range of 15 keV to 150 keV extendable up to ~ 1 MeV. It consists of three detectors (two Phoswich detectors, namely, RT-2/S, RT-2/G and one solid-state imaging detector RT-2/CZT) and one processing electronic device (RT-2/E). Both Phoswich detectors will have time resolved spectrum, whereas the solid-state imaging detector will have high resolved image of the solar flares in hard X-rays. We have used Co-57 (122 keV) radio-active source for onboard calibration of all three detectors. In this paper, we briefly discuss the in-flight performance of RT-2 instruments and present initial flight data from the instruments. This mission was launched into polar LEO (Low Earth Orbit) (~ 550 km) on 30th January 2009 from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia.