Simulation of the in-flight calibration of the collimator alignment and PSF for HXMT

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) is an X-ray astronomical satellite in 1–250 keV, consisting of three collimated instruments. We present the in-flight calibration approach of the collimator alignment and Point Spread Function (PSF) for HXMT, using both the direct fitting method and the imaging method. According to observational simulations of the Crab Nebula, we find that these two methods produce almost the same calibration accuracy of the alignment, and with a one-day scanning observation, the alignment can be calibrated to better than 0.45′ and 0.1′ along the wide and narrow directions of the Field of View (FOV) for a detector module, which corresponds to a localization accuracy of better than 0.1′ and meets the scientific requirement.