Status of the Lunar Electromagnetic Monitor in X-rays (LEM-X)
The Lunar Electromagnetic Monitor in X-rays (LEM-X) is an imager for X-ray Astronomy to be installed on the surface of the Moon, is funded by the Italian Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica and lead by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in the framework of the Italian “Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza”. The building block of LEM-X is represented by a pair of coded aperture cameras, each one built around four large-area linear Silicon Drift Detectors and able to image the sky within a field of view of ~1 sr with a source location accuracy of ~1 arcmin, while at the same time reaching a spectral resolution better than 350 eV FWHM at 6 keV. The LEM-X instrument preliminarily envisages about seven such camera pairs, arranged on a dome-like structure on the surface of the Moon, to reach a sensitivity better than 5 mCrab in 50 ks and 1 Crab in 1 s in the 2 – 50 keV energy band. In this contribution we describe the design of LEM-X, we discuss the scientific performance and we report the status of the instrument development.
Authors
- Evgeny Demenev (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3764-7751)
- Giuseppe Dilillo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5132-9821)
- Y. Evangelista (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6096-6710)
- R. Campana (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4794-5453)
- P. Malcovati (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6514-9672)
- Marco Gai
- M. Feroci (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7617-3421)
- Alessandro Turchi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3958-5512)
- Filippo Mele (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7882-6879)
- Alessio Nuti (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9352-2355)
- Giovanni Della Casa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1077-3875)
- Ugo Cortesi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2827-5239)
- M. Grassi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1369-5369)
- Francesco Ceraudo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9110-3192)
- E. Del Monte (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3013-6334)
- F. Ficorella (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0296-1193)
- G. Zampa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0238-4469)
- M. Fiorini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8297-1983)
- A. Argan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6230-665X)
- G. Bertuccio (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7283-021X)
- G. Pepponi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7397-1946)
- Fabio D’Amico (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6484-8858)
- F. Esposito (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9962-1648)
- I. Donnarumma (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4700-4549)
- Massimo Rapisarda
Institutions
- Fondazione Bruno Kessler (IT)
- University of Pavia (IT)
- Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte (IT)
- Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology (IT)
- Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica di Milano (IT)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Roma Tor Vergata (IT)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Trieste (IT)
- Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio
- National Institute for Astrophysics (IT)
- Politecnico di Milano (IT)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2024-08-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3018838
- Citations
- 2
- Primary Topic
- Particle Detector Development and Performance
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 1.32