Athena is the European Space Agency’s next flagship telescope, scheduled for launch in the 2030s. Its 2.5 m diameter mirror will be segmented and comprise more than 600 individual Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) mirror modules. Arranged in concentric annuli and following a Wolter-Schwartzschild design, the mirror modules are made of several tens of grazing incidence primary-secondary mirror pairs, each mirror made of silicon, coated to increase the effective area of the system, and shaped to bring the incoming photons to a common focus 12 m away. The mission aims to deliver a half-energy width of 5" and an effective area of about 1.4 m2 at 1 keV. We present the status of the optics technology, and illustrate recent X-ray results and the progress made on the environmental testing, manufacturing and assembly aspects of the optics.
Athena is the European Space Agency’s next flagship x-ray telescope, scheduled for launch in the 2030s. Its 2.5-m diameter mirror will be segmented and comprise more than 600 individual Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) grazing-incidence-angle imagers, called mirror modules. Arranged in concentric annuli and following a Wolter-Schwartzschild design, the mirror modules are made of several tens of primary-secondary mirror pairs, each mirror made of mono-crystalline silicon, coated to increase the collective area of the system, and shaped to bring the incoming photons to a common focus 12 m away. Aiming to deliver a half-energy width of 5”, and an effective area of about 1.4 m2 at 1 keV, the Athena mirror requires several hundred m2 of super-polished surfaces with a roughness of about 0.3 nm and a thickness of just 110 µm. SPO, using the highest-grade double-side polished 300 mm wafers commercially available, were invented for this purpose and have been consistently developed over the last several years to enable next-generation x-ray telescopes like Athena. SPO makes it possible to manufacture cost-effective, high-resolution, large-area x-ray optics by using all the advantages that mono-crystalline silicon and the mass production processes of the semiconductor industry provide. Ahead of important programmatic milestones for Athena, we present the status of the technology, and illustrate not only recent x-ray results but also the progress made on the environmental testing, manufacturing and assembly aspects of the technology.
Athena, the largest space-based x-ray telescope to be flown by the European Space Agency, uses a revolutionary new modular technology to assemble its 2.6 m diameter lens. The lens will consist of several hundreds of smaller x-ray lenslets, called mirror modules, which each consist of about 70 mirror pairs. Those mirror modules are arranged in circles in a large optics structure and will focus x-ray photons with an energy of 0.5 to 10 keV at a distance of 12 m onto the detectors of Athena. The point-spread function (PSF) of the optic shall achieve a half-energy width (HEW) of 5” at an energy of 1 keV, with an effective area of about 1.4 m2, corresponding to several hundred m2 of super-polished mirrors with a roughness of about 0.3 nm and a thickness of only 150 µm. Silicon Pore Optics (SPO), using the highest grade double-side polished 300 mm wafers commercially available, have been invented to enable such telescopes. SPO allows the cost-effective production of high-resolution, large area, x-ray optics, by using all the advantages that mono-crystalline silicon and the mass production processes of the semi-conductor industry provide. SPO has also shown to be a versatile technology that can be further developed for gamma-ray optics, medical applications and for material research. This paper will present the status of the technology and of the mass production capabilities, show latest performance results and discuss the next steps in the development.
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