THE NOAA GOES-12 SOLAR X-RAY IMAGER (SXI) 2. PERFORMANCE

The Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) was launched on 23 July 2001 on NOAA’s GOES-12 satellite and completed post-launch testing on 20 December 2001. It was brought into operations on 21 January 2003. This paper documents SXI performance and calibrations prior to an instrument degradation that occurred on 5 November 2003 and thus covers more than 420000 soft X-ray images of the Sun. This paper details component-level as well as full-system calibrations characterizing the spatial and spectral performance of the instrument, including the grazing-incidence mirror, filters, and the properties of the MCP-intensified CCD detector system. Routine image corrections are also described. These include background (dark current) subtraction, flat-fielding, off-band light-leak correction, and image pointing and timing considerations. In addition, a signal-to-noise analysis is presented. The information contained in this study is intended to enable researchers to conduct quantitative analysis of GOES-12 SXI images.