Ioffe Institute
Laboratory for Experimental Astrophysics
enru

Konus-RF database contains time profiles of gamma-ray bursts and soft gamma repeaters flares registered by Konus-RF in triggered and waiting modes.

Konus-RF instrument

Konus-RF is a Russian experiment launched on January 30, 2009 onboard Russian solar observatory Coronas-Photon to study solar flares, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and soft gamma repeaters (SGRs). It consists of two identical NaI(Tl) detectors, one of which (S1) is pointed to the Sun and the other (S2) to the opposite point in the sky. The instrument operated on near-Earth drifting orbit at 550 km altitude with the inclination of 82.5 degrees. Due to a very high particle background no science data is taken while the observatory is transiting the trapped radiation regions, so the effective observational time is about 20%. Observatory ceased to function on December 01, 2009 due to power failure.

Konus-RF worked in two modes: waiting mode and triggered mode. In the waiting mode, the count rate light curves are available in 15 energy channels spanning from 10 keV to 10 MeV with accumulation time 1 s for lower energies (up to 1000 keV) and 4 s for the rest. Fine energy resolution multichannel spectra were recorded each minute in 207 energy channels. Switching to the triggered mode occurred at a statistically significant excess of ~6 sigma above a background count rate within an interval of 1 s or 100 ms in the 40–160 keV energy window. In the triggered mode, Konus-RF recorded light curves in the same 15 energy channels with a varying time resolution from 2 to 64 ms and with total duration of 115 s, with a pre-trigger record being not less than one second with 2 ms resolution. While in the triggered mode, 182 multichannel spectra were taken in addition to the light curves as follows. The multichannel spectra were measured in two partially overlapping energy bands: ~8–1000 keV and ~280 keV–10 MeV. The first band consists of 112 channels and the second of 154 channels. Accumulation time of the first 30 spectra is fixed at 100 ms then 128 spectra are recorded each 500 ms followed by 24 spectra accumulated 2 s each.

Disclaimer

The presented Konus-RF pre-publication data are preliminary and may require further corrections.