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The Swift X-ray Telescope is designed to make astrometric, spectroscopic and photometric observations of the X-ray emission from Gamma-Ray Bursts and their afterglows in the 0.2–10 keV energy band. Here we report some results on the in-flight calibration of the Swift XRT effective area obtained analyzing observations of cosmic sources with different the analysis of cosmic sources intrinsic spectra and using the on-ground calibration and ray-tracing simulations as a starting point Our analysis includes the study of the effective area for different XRT operating modes. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The X-ray Telescope (XRT) for the SWIFT mission, built by the international consortium from Pennsylvania State University (US), University of Leicester (UK) and Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera (Italy), is already installed on the SWIFT spacecraft. The XRT has two key functions on SWIFT; to determine locations of GRBs to better than 5 arc seconds within 100 seconds of initial detection of a burst and to measure spectra and light curves of the X-ray afterglow over around four orders of magnitude of decay in the afterglow intensity. This paper summarises the XRT performance, operating modes and sensitivity for the detection of prompt and extended X-ray afterglows from gamma-ray bursts. The performance characteristics have been determined from data taken during the ground calibration campaign at MPE’s Panter facility in September 2002. © 2004 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]