The Lunar Electromagnetic Monitor in X-rays (LEM-X) is an imager for X-ray Astronomy to be installed on the surface of the Moon, is funded by the Italian Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica and lead by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in the framework of the Italian "Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza". The building block of LEM-X is represented by a pair of coded aperture cameras, each one built around four large-area linear Silicon Drift Detectors and able to image the sky within a field of view of ~1 sr with a source location accuracy of ~1 arcmin, while at the same time reaching a spectral resolution better than 350 eV FWHM at 6 keV. The LEM-X instrument preliminarily envisages about seven such camera pairs, arranged on a dome-like structure on the surface of the Moon, to reach a sensitivity better than 5 mCrab in 50 ks and 1 Crab in 1 s in the 2 – 50 keV energy band. In this contribution we describe the design of LEM-X, we discuss the scientific performance and we report the status of the instrument development.
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Monte et al. (2024) studied this question.
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