Early Results from the Low-Energy Concentrator Spectrometer On-Board Bepposax

Abstract

SAX, an acronym for “Satellite Italiano per Astronomia a raggi X”, now renamed “BeppoSAX” in honor of Giuseppe Occhialini, is the first X-ray mission sensitive in the very broad energy range between 0.1 and 300 keV (Boella et al. 1997a). The Narrow Field Instruments (NFI) have approximately 1° fields of view and consist of the imaging low- and medium-energy concentrator spectrometers (LEGS, 0.1-10 keV, Parmar et al. 1997; and MECS, 1-10 keV, Boella et al. 1997b), and the non-imaging high pressure gas scintillation proportional counter (HPGSPC, 3-120 keV, Manzo et al. 1997) and Phoswich detector system (PDS, 15-300 keV, Prontera et al. 1997). All the NFI are coaligned and are normally operated simultaneously. In addition, the payload includes two wide field cameras (WFC, 2-30 keV; Jager et al. 1997) which observe in directions perpendicular to the NFI. These allow the detection of X-ray transient phenomena, as well as long-term variability studies.