Abstract
The Monitor e Imageador de Raios X (MIRAX), under development at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil, is a hard X-ray astronomy experiment that will be launched in low-Earth orbit (650 km altitude, 15° inclination) onboard the Lattes satellite mission in 2018. MIRAX consists essentially in two coded-aperture imaging telescopes equipped with cadmium-zinc-telluride (CZT) solid-state room-temperature semiconductor detectors. One telescope (T1) has been in development at INPE's Astrophysics Division and will fly in a high altitude (∼ 43 km) balloon in 2014 for testing and demonstration; this development is called the protoMIRAX project. T1 uses an array of 13× 13 CZT planar detectors with dimensions 10mm× 10mm× 2mm and a 1mm-thick lead coded mask with 20 mm openings in a 13× 13 Modified Uniformly Redundant Array (MURA) basic pattern. It will have a 20°× 20° fully-coded field-of-view (FCFOV) and an angular resolution of 1.5°. T1 will be mounted in a balloon gondola with an attitude control and pointing systems as well as a 500 kbps telemetry and command capability for real-time operation and data acquisition. The imaging CZT detectors for the second telescope (T2) are being developed at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The detector plane for T2 will have a 0.6 mm spatial resolution and an area of 250 cm^{2}. A 0.3mm-thick tungsten mask with a random pattern will provide images with 6' angular resolution with a 20°× 20° FWHM FOV. In this presentation we will describe the current status of MIRAX and present results of the protoMIRAX detector, telescope and balloon gondola developments.
