Results from the Advanced Scintillator Compton Telescope (ASCOT) balloon payload

Tejaswita Sharma; Peter F. Bloser; James M. Ryan; Jason S. Legere; Mark L. McConnell

doi:10.1117/12.2576108

13 December 2020 Results from the Advanced Scintillator Compton Telescope (ASCOT) balloon payload

Tejaswita Sharma, Peter F. Bloser, James M. Ryan, Jason S. Legere, Mark L. McConnell

Proceedings Volume 11444, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2020: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 1144435 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2576108
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

The Advanced Scintillator Compton Telescope (ASCOT) is a medium-energy gamma-ray Compton telescope flown on NASA’s high-altitude scientific balloon from Palestine, TX on 5th July 2018. It uses commercially available highperformance scintillators like Cerium Bromide (CeBr₃) and p-terphenyl along with compact readout devices - silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) - for an improved instrument response. ASCOT was built to address the existing need for observations in the gamma-ray energy range of 0.4 - 20 MeV. Operating stably throughout the mission, it reached an altitude of 120,000 ft and observed the Crab Nebula at MeV energies for ~5 hours. Built on the legacy of COMPTEL (onboard CGRO), along with the hardware advancement ASCOT also makes use of the Time-of-Flight (ToF) background rejection technique for effective imaging. Presented here is the Energy and ToF calibrated flight data with optimal data cuts (Earth Horizon Cut, Pulse Shape Discrimination Cut). The growth curves generated using this data from 5 to 100 g/cm² of residual atmosphere in conjunction with the Monte Carlo simulations of the instrument response have been used to obtain the Cosmic Diffuse Gamma-ray (CDG) flux value of (1.28±0.37)×10^-5 photons/cm² /s/sr/keV for 0.4 – 0.7 MeV energy range. The 3σ upper limit for CDG flux is 1.8×10^-5 photons/cm² /s/sr/keV for 0.7-1.5 MeV and 2×10^-6 photons/cm² /s/sr/keV for 1.5-2.5 MeV. The analysis of the Crab Nebula from flight observation is underway.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Tejaswita Sharma, Peter F. Bloser, James M. Ryan, Jason S. Legere, and Mark L. McConnell "Results from the Advanced Scintillator Compton Telescope (ASCOT) balloon payload", Proc. SPIE 11444, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2020: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 1144435 (13 December 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2576108

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