The Low Energy X-ray telescope (LE) onboard the Insight-HXMT astronomy satellite

Understand

The low energy (LE) X-ray telescope is one of the three main instruments of the Insight-Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT).

• It is equipped with Swept Charge Device (SCD) sensor arrays with a total geometrical area of 384 cm2 and an energy band from 0.7 keV to 13 keV.
• In order to evaluate the particle induced X-ray background and the cosmic X-ray background simultaneously, LE adopts collimators to define four types of Field Of Views (FOVs).
• LE is constituted of three detector boxes (LEDs) and an electric control box (LEB) and achieves a good energy resolution of 140 eV at 5.9 keV, an excellent time resolution of 0.98 ms, as well as an extremely low pileup (<1% at 18000 cts/s).