In orbit performance and observations of the silicon strip experiment SuperAGILE

The SuperAGILE experiment is the hard X-ray monitor of the Italian AGILE gamma-ray mission. SuperAGILE is the first experiment for X-ray astronomy employing single-sided silicon microstrip detectors in space. The fine position sensitivity of these detectors allowed to design a coded mask imaging experiment very compact and resource-effective, operating in the 18-60 keV energy range. In this paper we present the design of the experiment, its development as well as its first operations in orbit, and a brief summary of the main scientific results achieved after 12 months of nominal observations.