The Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) on-board the joint ESA-CAS SMILE mission is a wide-field lobster-eye telescope designed to characterize the Earth's magnetospheric boundaries, by observing emission from the solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) process in the soft X-ray band. It has two large CCD370 (Teledyne-e2v) detectors, derived from the CCD-Bruyeres for ESA’s PLATO mission, with minor optimizations for soft X-ray detection, related to higher responsivity and increased radiation hardness. We present the first performance results under X-ray illumination of the CCD370 in SXI-specific operating conditions, including 6x6 on-chip pixel binning, over a range of pixel readout rates and operating temperatures.
|