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X-Ray Polarimetry Workshop SLAC, Stanford, California 9-11 February 2004 |
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Polarimetry with XEUS
Enrico
Costa
IASF-CNR/INAF
costa@rm.iasf.cnr.it
Enrico Costa, Giuseppe di Persio, Marco Feroci, M.Frutti, Luigi Pacciani, Alda Rubini, Paolo Soffitta, IASF-Roma Ronaldo Bellazzini, Luca Baldini, Alessandro Brez, Luca Latronico, Nicola Omodei, Massimo Minuti, Massimiliano Razzano, Gloria Spandre, INFN-Pisa
XEUS is the major mission of X-ray Astronomy foreseen by ESA for the second decade of the present millennium. It has the ambition of evolving the X-ray telescopes with high angular resolution to effective areas comparable to those of largest optical telescopes. It is based on the phases: XEUS-1 with a surface of 6 square meters will be subsequently evolved to XEUS-2 arriving 30 square meters at low energies. The concept is implemented with a pair of independent satellites, one carrying the optics, the other carrying the focal plane instrumentation, hold, by an active ACS at a focal distance of 60m. In the last developments the focal plane has been reassessed with the inclusion of a polarimeter, based on the Micro Pattern Gas Chamber concept. The baseline design is a plane extrapolation of the design under development at Pisa/INFN and Rome/IASF. Thanks to the large scale of the telescope, the polarimeter will be matched with the performance of the optics in terms of angular resolution. The huge effective area (of the order of 1 m2 for XEUS-1) will represent a significant improvement with respect to any pioneering polarimeter. Moreover this will make possible, for the first time, polarimetry with an angular resolution of 4 arcseconds.
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For more information, contact
Jennifer Formichelli |
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