The Leicester Ginga Data Archive

Ginga, formerly known as Astro-C was a joint Japanese/UK mission launched by the M-3SII-3 rocket on February 5, 1987 from Kagoshima Space Center. The observation period ended on November 1, 1991 when Ginga reentered the earth's atmosphere. Scientific instrumentation of Ginga consists of the Large Area Counter (LAC), the All-Sky Monitor (ASM) and the Gamma-Ray Burst Detector (GBD). The LAC, Ginga's main detector, was a proportional counter with 4000 cm² effective area, sensitive to X-rays between 1.5 and 37 keV. This was a non-imaging detector, producing only spectra and light curves - in many ways the Ginga mission had similar capabilities to the current RXTE mission. Ginga made approximately 1000 observations, covering all classes of cosmic X-ray sources then known. A target list is provided by the X-ray astronomy group of ISAS.

Almost all Ginga target and background observations have been uniformly processed at Leicester to make a complete, quality-controlled Ginga archive with a rich set of associated data products. The total size of the archive is 7.3 Gb. This archive has been made available here, and is also available from HEASARC.

A separate restoration effort of the Ginga data was carried out by ISAS in Japan. The archive of data and software opened in March 2004 at the Japanese Data ARchive and Transfer System, DARTS at ISAS.