Speaker
Summary
AGILE, the Italian space mission dedicated to gamma and hard-X
astrophysics, was succesfully launched on 23 April 2007 and is currently
fully operative. The Mini-Calorimeter (MCAL) onboard the AGILE satellite
is a scintillation detector made of 20 kg of segmented CsI(Tl)
scintillators with photodiode readout with a total geometrical area of
1400 cm2. MCAL can work both as a slave of the AGILE Silicon tracker
and as an independent detector for gamma-ray bursts (GRB) detection in
the 300 keV - 200 MeV energy range. Despite its limited thickness, due
to weight constraints, MCAL has proven to succesfully self-trigger GRBs
at MeV energies providing photon-by-photon data with less than 2
microsec time resolution and almost all-sky detection capabilities. The
MCAL design and characteristics, as well as the inflight
performance after one year of operation in space and the scientific
results obtained so far will be reviewed and discussed.
