Background to Ginga

The LAC on board Ginga consisted of 8 identical, sealed proportional counters with a total effective geometric area of 4500 cm². Each detector had a co-aligned stainless steel collimator yielding an elliptical field of view 1 x 1.8 degrees. The LAC was sensitive over the energy range 2-37 keV and had an energy resolution of 18% at 6 keV.

Ginga had no facility for simultaneous background monitoring, thus a typical Ginga observation consisted of one day on source and one day pointing at an adjacent area of blank sky. Ginga performed approximately 1000 observations of about 350 different objects. The observing program included all known classes of X-ray sources.