Speaker
Jon Lapington
(University of Leicester)
Description
Microchannel plate x-ray optics is an emerging technology, recently space proven on the NASA DXL sounding rocket experiment and soon to fly on the ESA Bepi-Colombo mission to Mercury. This compact, light-weight technology enables wide field of view x-ray imaging by mimicking the structure of a lobster’s eye; MPOs utilise grazing incidence reflections within the high aspect ratio square section pores of a curved microchannel plate to focus x-rays over a wide angular range on to a focal plane detector.
We describe the detector requirements for the proposed Einstein Probe (EP) mission, a small scientific satellite dedicated to time-domain high-energy astrophysics. EP will utilise a very large field of view MPO for discovery of high-energy transients and to monitor variable objects at x-ray energies in the range 0.5-4 keV. The mission requires an array of large format soft x-ray imaging detectors with moderate spatial and energy resolution.
We discuss the detector options available and the trade-offs in terms of performance, cost effectiveness, required resources and operational risks for the 5+ year mission. We present results and simulations from the detector development undertaken during the mission advanced study phase.
Author
Jon Lapington
(University of Leicester)
Co-authors
Dr
Chen Zhang
(NAOC, China)
Dr
Hong Li
(Tsinghua University, China)
Prof.
Hua Feng
(Tsinghua University, China)
Dr
Jianfeng Ji
(Tsinghua University, China)
Prof.
Julian Osborne
(University of Leicester)
Prof.
Paul O'Brien
(University of Leicester)
Prof.
Richard Willingale
(University of Leicester)
Prof.
Weimin Yuan
(NAOC, China)
Dr
Wenxin Wang
(Tsinghua University, China)
