| Abstract : | The proposed Daksha mission, consisting of two satellites in antipodal orbits, has been designed to detect and characterize transient high energy events (1 keV - 1 MeV) over the entire sky, including the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events, gamma-ray bursts, and magnetar flares. Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detectors cover the 20-200 keV energy range and are the workhorses of the telescope with the highest effective area. Each satellite will have 17 flight-worthy Medium Energy packages, with each package having a total of 20 CZT detectors. We, therefore, need to characterize and calibrate about 1500 CZT detectors through thermal cycling, pixel level gain and offset measurement, spectral resolution measurement with multiple radioactive sources, and identification of bad and noisy pixels at different discrimination thresholds and operating temperatures. We present the hardware setup for calibration and characterization at a large scale and the software pipeline for data processing. We will also show preliminary results from the calibration and characterization of existing detectors. |
