The baseline AGILE instrument has been designed to obtain: (1) an excellent imaging capability in the energy range 100 MeV-50 GeV, improving the EGRET angular resolution by a factor of 2, and achieving a source location accuracy ~ 5¢-20¢ for intense sources; (2) a wide field-of-view, allowing simultaneous coverage of ~ 1/5 of the entire sky per pointing; (3) the shortest deadtime ever achieved ( £ 200 ms) for gamma-ray detection (a factor of ~ 500 better than that of EGRET), and a trigger based exclusively on silicon plane detectors; (4) a good sensitivity for point sources, comparable to that of EGRET for on-axis sources, and substantially better for off-axis sources; (5) a good sensitivity to photons in the energy range 30-100 MeV, obtained by efficient hardware and triggering capabilities.
AGILE will be able to provide spectral information with limited resolution, typically D E/E £ 1 at 100 MeV and D E/E ~ 2 at 1 GeV.
An X-ray detector, Super-AGILE, sensitive in the 10-40 keV band will provide hard X-ray imaging and moderate spectroscopy simultaneously with the gamma-ray detector. Imaging will be achieved by an ultra-light coded mask imaging system positioned on top of the gamma-ray tracker in combination with silicon detector tiles properly arranged on the first tracker plane.