The Athena WFI Science Products Module

David N. Burrows; Steven Allen; Marshall Bautz; Esra Bulbul; Julia Erdley; Abraham D. Falcone; Stanislav Fort; Catherine E. Grant; Sven Herrmann; Jamie Kennea; Robert Klar; Ralph Kraft; Adam Mantz; Eric D. Miller; Paul Nulsen; Steve Persyn; Pragati Pradhan; Dan Wilkins

arXiv · 1808.02883

The Athena WFI Science Products Module

David N. Burrows·Steven Allen·Marshall Bautz·Esra Bulbul·Julia Erdley·Abraham D. Falcone·Stanislav Fort·Catherine E. Grant·Sven Herrmann·Jamie Kennea·Robert Klar·Ralph Kraft·Adam Mantz·Eric D. Miller·Paul Nulsen·Steve Persyn·Pragati Pradhan·Dan Wilkins

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Abstract

The Science Products Module (SPM), a US contribution to the Athena Wide Field Imager, is a highly capable secondary CPU that performs special processing on the science data stream. The SPM will have access to both accepted X-ray events and those that were rejected by the on-board event recognition processing. It will include two software modules. The Transient Analysis Module will perform on-board processing of the science images to identify and characterize variability of the prime target and/or detection of serendipitous transient X-ray sources in the field of view. The Background Analysis Module will perform more sophisticated flagging of potential background events as well as improved background characterization, making use of data that are not telemetered to the ground, to provide improved background maps and spectra. We present the preliminary design of the SPM hardware as well as a brief overview of the software algorithms under development.

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David N. Burrows, Steven Allen, Marshall Bautz, Esra Bulbul, Julia Erdley, Abraham D. Falcone, Stanislav Fort, Catherine E. Grant, Sven Herrmann, Jamie Kennea, Robert Klar, Ralph Kraft, Adam Mantz, Eric D. Miller, Paul Nulsen, Steve Persyn, Pragati Pradhan, Dan Wilkins. 2018-08-08. The Athena WFI Science Products Module. https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02883

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