The AstroSat Observatory

Abstract

AstroSat is India's first Ultra-violet (UV) and X-ray astronomy observatory in space. The satellite was launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on 28 September 2015 from Sriharikota Range north of Chennai on the eastern coast of India. AstroSat carries five scientific instruments and one auxiliary instrument. Four of these consist of co-aligned telescopes and detectors mounted on a common deck of the satellite to observe stars and galaxies simultaneously in the near- and far-UV wavelengths and a broad range of X-ray energies (0.3 to 80 keV). The fifth instrument consists of three X-ray detectors and is mounted on a rotating platform on a side that is oriented 90 degrees with respect to the other instruments to scan the sky for X-ray transients. An auxiliary instrument monitors the charged particle environment in the path of the satellite.

arXiv comment37 pages, 27 figures. This chapter will appear in "Section III (X-ray missions) of the first volume (X-ray Experimental Techniques and Missions), of the "Handbook of X-ray and Gamma-ray Astrophysics" (Section editors: Arvind Parmar, Shuang-Nan Zhang, Andrea Santangelo; Editors in chief: C. Bambi and A. Santangelo)

References in corpus (22)

• In-orbit Calibrations of the Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope
• Calibration of the Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) instrument on-board AstroSat
• Additional Calibration of the Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope on board AstroSat
• The Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager on AstroSat
• Ultra Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) on ASTROSAT
• In-orbit Performance of UVIT and First Results
• SNR 1E 0102.2-7219 as an X-ray Calibration Standard in the 0.5-1.0 keV Bandpass and Its Application to the CCD Instruments aboard Chandra, Suzaku, Swift and XMM-Newton
• Prompt emission polarimetry of Gamma Ray Bursts with ASTROSAT CZT-Imager
• Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) in Orbit Performance : Calibration, background, analysis software
• Dissecting star-formation in the "Atoms-for-Peace" galaxy: Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope observations of the post-merger galaxy NGC7252
• Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope Observations of the Star-Forming Ring in NGC7252: Evidence of Possible AGN Feedback Suppressing Central Star Formation
• The First Extensive Exploration of UV-bright Stars in the Globular Cluster NGC 2808
• The AstroSat Mass Model: Imaging and Flux studies of off-axis sources with CZTI
• Calibration of AstroSat/UVIT Gratings and Spectral Responses
• The Search for Fast Transients with CZTI
• Curvit: An open-source Python package to generate light curves from UVIT data
• Performance of the UVIT Level-2 Pipeline
• AstroSat study of the globular cluster NGC 2298: probable evolutionary scenarios of hot HB stars
• Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) observation of the Galactic Globular Cluster NGC 7492
• Charged Particle Monitor on the AstroSat mission
• An optimized radio follow-up strategy for stripped-envelope core-collapse supernovae
• Using collimated CZTI as all sky X-ray detector based on Earth Occultation Technique