Understanding The GLAST Burst Monitor Detector Calibration: A Detailed Simulation Of The Calibration Including The Environment

The GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) is the secondary instrument on NASA's next Gamma-ray mission GLAST. It will enhance the capabilities of GLAST by locating and detecting cosmic gamma-ray bursts at lower energies by the use of 12 NaI detectors (energy range 10 keV to 1 MeV) and 2 BGO-detectors (energy range 150 keV to 30 MeV). GBM was built in a close collaboration between the MPE and the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The angular and energy response of each GBM detector has been calibrated using various radioactive sources at different incidence angles relative to the detector in a laboratory environment at the MPE in 2005. To facilitate the understanding of the reconstruction of the detector response, a detailed simulation of the whole laboratory environment and the setup of the calibration source were performed. A modified version of the CERN GEANT 4 simulation software (provided by collaborators at the Los Alamos National Laboratory) was used.