Silicon drift detector applied to X-ray pulsar navigation

Abstract In this paper, a focused detection system for X-ray pulsar-based Navigation (XNAV) is designed based on Silicon Drift Detector (SDD). The detector electronics mainly adopts the digital trapezoidal shaping method to measure the Times-Of-Arrival (TOAs) and energy of photons. The time measurement accuracy is better than 500ns. The energy resolution is 191eV at 8.05keV, and the maximum count rate is 500kcps between 1 and 12keV. In the semi-physical simulation experiment, the filtering of noise photons by energy discrimination significantly improves the correlation degree between the cumulative pulse profile and the standard profile.