Micropore x-ray optics developments and application to an x-ray timing mission

Abstract

Very lightweight X-ray optics are being developed by ESA and its industrial partners, for a number of X-ray astronomy and planetary missions. These developments could significantly improve the performance of future X-ray timing instrumentation. Based on Micro-Channel Plate (MCP) technology, the novel optics effectively reduce the mirror thickness by almost two orders of magnitude, and therefore also the mass of the telescope optics. Very large collecting areas become feasible for space implementation, especially as required for X-ray timing observations. Furthermore this technology leads to much reduced detector sizes due to the use of imaging X-ray optics. This dramatically improves the detected signal-to-noise ratios, as well as introducing photon collection areas sufficiently large as to study temporal phenomena on the millisecond time scale. This is particularly important to improve the studies of compact X-ray sources, both for improving the signal to noise ratios in temporal bins so that spectral or fluctuation analyses are improved, and for extending the range of measurements to fainter classes of objects. We present a brief overview of the MCP micro-pore optics technology and a possible design for an X-ray timing mission based on this technology and we analyze the performance of such mission.