Design and performance of the focal plane camera for FXT onboard the Einstein Probe satellite

The Einstein Probe (EP) satellite is designed for X-ray time-domain astronomy. The Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) is one of the scientific payloads onboard EP. It will mainly be used for the follow-up X-ray observation, and it will also be used for the sky survey and Target of Opportunity (ToO) observation. The focal plane detector of FXT provided by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) adopts a PNCCD sensor. For detector cooling, a helium pulse tube refrigerator is used, provided by the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (TIPC), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), to keep the detector working at a temperature of −90 ± 0.5 °C. The PNCCD driving and data acquisition electronics are developed by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), CAS. To observe different celestial sources, we designed six filter wheel positions and three scientific operating modes for the PNCCD detector: the full-frame mode, the partial-window mode, and the timing mode. In the full-frame mode, the system frame rate is 20 frame/s and the energy resolution of the whole system reaches 92 eV @ 1.49 keV (FWHM). The frame rate of partial-window mode is 500 frame/s. In the timing mode, the time resolution is about 94 μs. This paper mainly introduces the design and test results of the focal plane camera.