A systematic analysis of the XMM-Newton background: III. Impact of the magnetospheric environment

Abstract

A detailed characterization of the particle induced background is fundamental for many of the scientific objectives of the Athena X-ray telescope, thus an adequate knowledge of the background that will be encountered by Athena is desirable. Current X-ray telescopes have shown that the intensity of the particle induced background can be highly variable. Different regions of the magnetosphere can have very different environmental conditions, which can, in principle, differently affect the particle induced background detected by the instruments. We present results concerning the influence of the magnetospheric environment on the background detected by EPIC instrument onboard XMM-Newton through the estimate of the variation of the in-Field-of-View background excess along the XMM-Newton orbit. An important contribution to the XMM background, which may affect the Athena background as well, comes from soft proton flares. Along with the flaring component a low-intensity component is also present. We find that both show modest variations in the different magnetozones and that the soft proton component shows a strong trend with the distance from Earth.

To appear in Experimental Astronomy. Presented at AHEAD Background Workshop, 28-30 November 2016. Rome, Italy

Cited by in corpus (10)

• A Systematic Analysis of the XMM-Newton Background: I. Dataset and Extraction Procedures
• Analysis of the unconcentrated background of the EPIC-pn camera on board XMM-Newton
• Prediction and understanding of soft proton contamination in XMM-Newton: a machine learning approach
• Prediction of soft proton intensities in the near-Earth space using machine learning
• Unveiling the origin of XMM-Newton soft proton flares: I. Design and validation of a response matrix for proton spectral analysis
• Unveiling the origin of XMM-Newton soft proton flares II. Systematics in the proton spectral analysis
• Soft proton scattering at grazing incidence from X-ray mirrors: analysis of experimental data in the framework of the non-elastic approximation
• Scattering efficiencies measurements of soft protons at grazing incidence from an Athena Silicon Pore Optics sample
• Ruminations Upon the Modeling of X-ray Foregrounds, Backgrounds and Faint Sources
• The origin of the unfocused XMM-Newton background, its variability and lessons learned for ATHENA