Integration and calibration of DEPFET macropixel detectors for MIXS

The Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS) is an instrument on board of the 5th ESA cornerstone mission BepiColombo. This Spectrometer comprises two instruments for imaging x-ray spectroscopy of the Mercury surface. The detector plane arrays (DPA) for the energy and spatial resolved detection of x-rays are based on DEPFET (Depleted P-channel FET) macropixel detectors with 64 x 64 pixel each and 300 x 300 mu m(2) pixel size. The MIXS target energy band is from 0.5 to 7 keV with an energy resolution better than 200 eV at 1 keV at mission end. This allows to access the Fe-L line at about 0.7 keV, which was not accessible to previous instruments, and to separate the x-ray lines of the elements of interest.Before a detector chip is integrated into a detector module, it is electrically pre-characterized in order to select only the best chips for the complex and time-consuming integration. The high degree of complexity of the integration process comes from the need to thermally decouple the detector chip from its readout and steering ASICs by a sophisticated mechanical structure, due to the limited amount of cooling power available for the instrument. After the spectroscopic characterization of the detector modules, the flight and flight spare detectors were calibrated at the PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt) beamlines at the BESSY-II synchrotron. We report on the pre-characterization, integration, qualification and calibration of MIXS flight and flight spare detectors, which is now successfully completed.