The Chandrayaan-1 X-ray spectrometer

Abstract

The Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS) is a compact X-ray spectrometer for the Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission. It exploits heritage from the D-C1XS instrument on ESA’s SMART-1 mission. C1XS is designed to measure absolute and relative abundances of major rock-forming elements (principally Mg, Al, Si, Ti, Ca and Fe) over the lunar surface. The baseline design consists of 24 nadir pointing Swept Charge Device detectors, which provide high detection efficiency in the 1–7 keV range, which contains the X-ray fluorescence lines of the above elements of interest. Micromachined collimators provide a 14 degree FWHM FOV, equivalent to 25 km from 100 km altitude. A deployable door protects the instrument during launch and cruise, and also provides a 55Fe calibration X-ray source for detector calibration. Additional refinements compared to D-C1XS will result in a significantly improved energy resolution. To record the incident solar X-ray flux at the Moon, C1XS carries an X-ray Solar Monitor (XSM). C1XS will arrive at the Moon in the run up to the maximum of the solar cycle 24, and the expected high incident X-ray flux coupled to a 100 km circular polar orbit, will provide composition data accurate to better than 10% of major elemental abundances over the lunar surface