Using the EXIST Active Shields for Earth Occultation Observations of X-ray Sources

The EXIST active shields, planned for the main detectors of the coded aperture telescope, will have approximately 15 times the area of the BATSE detectors, and they will have a good geometry on the spacecraft for viewing both the leading and trailing Earth’s limb for occultation observations. These occultation observations will complement the imaging observations of EXIST and can extend them to higher energies. Earth occultation observations of the hard X-ray sky with BATSE on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory developed and demonstrated the capabilities of large, flat, uncollimated detectors for applying this observation method. With BATSE, a catalog of 179 X-ray sources was monitored twice every spacecraft orbit for 9 years at energies above about 25 keV, resulting in 83 definite detections and 36 possible detections with 5 σ detection sensitivities of 3.5-20 mcrab (20-430 keV) depending on the sky location. This catalog included four transients discovered with this technique and many variable objects (galactic and extragalactic.) This poster describes the Earth occultation technique, summarizes the BATSE occultation observations, and compares the basic observational parameters of the occultation detector elements of BATSE and EXIST.