Ground-based x-ray calibration of the Astro-H soft x-ray telescopes

Abstract

The X-ray astronomy satellite Astro-H, planned to be launched in 2015, will have several instruments for covering a wide energy band from a few hundreds eV to 600 keV. There are four X-ray telescopes, and two of them are soft X-ray telescopes (SXTs) covering up to about 15 keV. One is for an X-ray micro-calorimeter detector (SXS) and the other is for an X-ray CCD detector (SXI). The design of the SXTs is a conical approximation of the Wolter Type-I optics, which is also adopted for the telescopes on the previous mission Suzaku launched in 2005. It consists 203 thin-foil reflectors coated with gold monolayer (2000 Å) on the aluminum substrate (101.6 mm length) with the thickness of 0.15, 0.23 and 0.31 mm. These are nested confocally within the radius of 58 to 225 mm. The focal length of SXTs is 5.6 m. The weight is as light as ~ 43 kg per telescope. We present the current status of the calibration activity of two SXTs (SXT-1 and SXT-2). The developments of two SXTs were completed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). First X-ray measurements with a diverging beam at the GSFC 100m beamline found an angular resolution at 8.0 keV to be 1.1 and 1.0 arcmin (HPD) for SXT-1 and SXT-2, respectively. The full characterization of the X-ray performance has been now continuously calibrated with the 30m X-ray beamline facility at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan. We adopted a raster scan method with a narrow X-ray pencil beam with the divergence of ~ 15". X-ray characterization of the two SXTs has been measured from May and December 2013, respectively. In the case of SXT-1, the on-axis effective area was approximately 580, 445, 370, 270, 185 and 90 cm² at energies of 1.5, 4.5, 8.0, 9.4, 11.1 and 12.9 keV respectively. The effective area of SXT-2 is 2% larger than that of SXT-1 irrespective to X-ray energy. The on-axis angular resolution of SXT-1 was evaluated as 1.3 - 1.5 arcmin (HPD) in the 1.5 - 13 keV band. The resolution was slightly got worse at higher energies by ~ 0:3 arcmin. Otherwise, the resolution of SXT-2 is 1.2 arcmin, almost irrespective to X-ray energy. The field of view (FOV) was ~ 16 arcmin at 1.5 keV, decreasing with increasing X-ray energy, and became ~ 8 arcmin at 13 keV. The FOV is defined here as the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the vignetting curve. The X-ray performance of SXT-1 and SXT-2 meets the system requirements. Because all the parameters of the SXT-2 is slightly better that of SXT-1, we adopted the SXT-2 telescope for the SXS detector of the Astro-H primary instrument with the narrow FOV.