Abstract

The Reflection Grating Spectrometer Experiment (RGS), which has been selected for flight on the European Space Agency's X-Ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM), includes two arrays of reflection gratings that are placed in the X-ray optical path behind two separate grazing incidence X-ray telescopes. Each of the grating arrays picks off roughly half the X-ray light emanating from its telescope and diffracts it to a dedicated strip of charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors offset from the telescope focal plane. The arrays contain 224 100 mm X 200 mm gratings, each mounted at a graze angle of 1.58° to the incident beam. The gratings are produced by epoxy replication of a common master onto very thin substrates. Both the gratings and the detectors are mounted on a Rowland circle which also includes the telescope focus. In this paper, we review the current state of both the engineering and the optical designs for the grating arrays.

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