2009/12/31 by P. Conconi, S. Campana, G. Tagliaferri +8 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Advanced X-ray Imaging Techniques #Angular resolution (graph drawing) #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Catadioptric system #Coma (optics) #Curvature #Field of view #Geometry #Hyperboloid #Lens (geology) #Optics #Paraboloid #Physics #Surface (topology) #Telescope #X-ray telescope #astro-ph.HE #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16513.x
Accepted for publication in the MNRAS (11pages, 3 table, 13 figures)
arxiv created 2010/02/11 · openalex publication_date 2010/04/01 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
X-ray mirrors are usually built in the Wolter I (paraboloid–hyperboloid) configuration. This design exhibits no spherical aberration on-axis but suffers from field curvature, coma and astigmatism, therefore, the angular resolution degrades rapidly with increasing off-axis angles. Different mirror designs exist in which the primary and secondary mirror profiles are expanded as a power series in order to increase the angular resolution at large off-axis positions, at the expanses of the on-axis performances. Here we present the design and global trade off study of an X-ray mirror systems based on polynomial optics in view of the Wide Field X-ray Telescope (WFXT) mission. WFXT aims at performing an extended cosmological survey in the soft X-ray band with unprecedented flux sensitivity. To achieve these goals the angular resolution required for the mission is very demanding, 5 arcsec mean resolution across a 1 field of view. In addition an effective area of 5–9000 cm2 at 1 keV is needed.