Abstract
The ROSAT project is an international collaboration between W.Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA. The satellite, due to be launched in February 1990, carries a payload of two co-aligned imaging telescopes: the German X-ray Telescope (XRT) which operates in the soft X-ray band (0.1-2 keV or 6-100 Å) and the UK Wide Field Camera (WFC) which operates in the XUV band (0.02-0.2 keV or 60-600 Å). ROSAT will perform two main tasks in its anticipated 2-4 year lifetime: a 6-month all-sky survey in the soft X-ray and XUV bands followed by a programme of pointed observations for detailed studies of thousands of individual targets. In this paper we review the design and performance of the WFC. The instrument is a grazing incidence telescope comprising a set of 3 nested, Wolter-Schwarzschild Type I, gold-coated, aluminium mirrors, with a microchannel plate detector at their common focus. Thin plastic and metal film filters define the wavelength passbands.
Published Version
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