One year of in-orbit operation of the AGILE Payload

The other Authors are with INAF Department in Roma and Milan or with Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) department in Trieste, Como, Roma, Pavia or with Ente Nazionale Energie Alternative (ENEA) department in Roma, Bologna or with Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI). AGILE, an Italian Space Agency (ASI) mission dedicated to the exploration of the gamma-ray Universe, was successfully launched on April 23, 2007 from the Indian base of Sriharikota in an low-particle background equatorial orbit at 550 km height. AGILE gamma ray range cover the 30 MeV - 50 GeV band with its detectors combined together in the GammaRay Imaging Detector (GRID). An X-ray imager (SuperAGILE) operates in the 18 - 60 keV band. Some of the payload instruments are also operated to detect transient X and gamma events with the maln target being the Gamma Ray Burst in the SuperAGILE band and above 300 keV. The GRID instrument consists of a Silicon-Tungsten Tracker, a Caesium Iodide MiniCalorimeter (MCAL), and a plastic-scintillator nticoincidence system (ACS). The GRID achieves an angular resolution of about 15 for bright sources with an unprecedented large fieldof- view about 2.5 sr with a time resolution of few microsec and a very reduced dead-time (less than 200 microsec for a gamma detection). The hard X-ray imager (SuperAGILE) combines a tungsten coded mask with Si detector with a technology identical to the Si-Tracker. It is on top of the gamma-ray detector and has an optimal angular resolution (about 6 arcmin) with good sensitivity over about 1 sr field of view (10-15 mCrab on axis for a I-day integration). The burst monitoring combines the data from SuperAGILE and from MCAL which operates independently with a specific operative mode from 300 keV up to several tens of MeV. All the detector operations are mastered by the Payload Data Handling Unit (PDHU) that includes several operation for data selection and background rejection ©2008 IEEE.