Thermal simulations of temperature excursions...
By Samantha L. Stever
As a researcher, I specialise in systematic effects. Athena will be a very sensitive instrument, but its scientific requirements demand a precise understanding of any detrimental effects of the environment. Because Athena flies at L2, cosmic rays will constantly be impacting the spacecraft and depositing their energy into the detector wafer. These impacts will be seen as a thermal noise. In this paper, we simulated the detector wafer under a realistic level of energy deposition from cosmic ray impacts in space. We used this simulation to test how much simulated X-rays have their measured energy affected by these frequent cosmic ray impacts. We found that the loss to the energy resolution is about 10% of the budgeted amount, and also proved that this simulation tool is a valuable method for probing instrument design changes.