João Braga, INPE, Divisão de Astrofísica (DAS/CEA)
The protoMIRAX hard X-ray imaging telescope is a balloon-borne experiment developed as a pathfinder for the MIRAX satellite mission. The experiment consists essentially in a wide-field (20x20 degrees) coded-aperture hard X-ray (30-200 keV) imager with a square array (13x13) of 2mm-thick planar CZT detectors with a total area of 169 cm2. The main objective of protoMIRAX is to carry out imaging spectroscopy of selected bright sources to demonstrate the performance of a prototype of the MIRAX hard X-ray imager. At the same time, this project allows the development of new technology in electronics and mechanics for X-ray detectors and imaging systems. We have also developed an attitude control system for the balloon gondola and new data handling and ground systems that also include prototypes for the MIRAX satellite. In this presentation we describe the protoMIRAX instrument and all the subsystems of its balloon gondola, and we show detailed simulated results of the instrument performance.