Verification of the Astro-E Hard X-ray Detector based on newly developed Ground Support Equipment

We report the first results of the ground test of the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD) on board the Astro-E mission, by means of the newly developed Ground Support Equipment (GSE). Astro-E will be launched in 2000 by a Japanese M-V rocket. In order to verify the detector system during the limited time before launch, fast and versatile GSE is necessary. For this, we have developed a flexible test system based on nine VME I/O boards for a SUN workstation. These boards carry reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with 50,000 gates, together with 1 Mbyte SRAM devices tightly coupled to each FPGA device. As an application of using this GSE, we have tested the performance of a phoswich unit of the Flight Model of the HXD. In this paper, we present a schematic view of the GSE highlighting the functional design, and the results of our ground test of the HXD-sensor under the high count rate environment (approximately 10 kHz/unit) expected in orbit.