|
What happens next?
- The free electrons are pulled along by the electrical field of RXTE's PCU detector.
- Inside the PCU detector there are anode wires. As the bunch of free electrons (from the original photon event) hit a wire, the PCU counts it as an electrical charge. The anode wire then measures the total charge from all the electrons in a single X-ray photon hit.
- The counts (many per second) are read by the on-board computer. The total charge collected by the PCU detector is related to the energy of the original photon. The information is sent to Earth as a time series (how many counts per millisecond).
|