HEL1OS – A Hard X-ray Spectrometer on Board Aditya-L1

HEL1OS (High Energy L1Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer) is one of the remote sensing payloads on board Aditya-L1 mission designed to continuously monitor and measure the time-resolved spectra of solar flares between 8 keV and 150 keV. This broad energy range has been covered by using compound semiconductor detectors: cadmium telluride (CdTe: 8 – 70 keV) and cadmium zinc telluride (CZT: 20 – 150 keV) with geometric areas of 0.5 cm2 and 32 cm2, respectively. A stainless steel collimator provides a field-of-view of 6° × 6° optimized to limit the off-axis response while keeping the design within the instrument mass constraints. The in-house designed low-noise digital pulse processing-based front-end electronics has achieved a spectral resolution of ≈ 1 keV at 14 keV (CdTe) and ≈ 7 keV at 60 keV (CZT). The instrument is also equipped with processing and power electronics to process the signal, drive the electronics, bias the detectors with required low and high voltages for optimal performance of the overall system. In this article, we present design aspects of the instrument, results from the pre-launch ground-based tests, and the in-orbit operations, which have indicated optimal performance in line with that expected.