Scanning sky monitor (SSM) onboard AstroSat

Authors :: Dhruti Ranjan Gaan
M. Ramakrishna Sharma
V. Chandra Babu
V. Girish
S. Seetha
A. K. Rajarajan
Anil Agarwal
Manoj Kumar
Brajpal Singh
Kumar
G. Nagesh
Pankaj Agarwal
B. N. Ashoka
Prashanth Kulshresta
N. Sitaramamurthy
R N Yadav
Dipankar Bhattacharya
Ravi Kulkarni
Nirmal Iyer
Mathew Sebastian
Anuj Nandi
Ankur Kushwaha
Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji
Vivek Kumar Agarwal
B. T. Ravishankar
Anand Jain
G. Meena
M. C. Ramadevi
D. Radhika
S. Vaishali
Source :: Experimental Astronomy. 44:11-23
Publication Year :: 2017
Publisher :: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2017.
Abstract: Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) onboard AstroSat is an Xray sky monitor in the soft X-ray band designed with a large field of view to detect and locate transient X-ray sources and alert the astronomical community about interesting phenomena in the X-ray sky. SSM comprises position sensitive proportional counters with 1D coded mask for imaging. There are three detector units mounted on a platform capable of rotation which helps covering about 50% of the sky in one full rotation. This paper discusses the elaborate details of the instrument and few immediate results from the instrument after launch.