eROSITA will be the primary instrument on-board the Russian
"Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma" (SRG) satellite which will be launched from
Baikonur in 2012 and placed in an L2 orbit. The mission eROSITA should perform the first imaging
all-sky survey in the medium energy X-ray range up to 10 keV with an
unprecedented spectral and angular resolution.
The nature of the mysterious Dark Energy that is driving the Universe
apart is one of the most exciting questions facing astronomy and physics
today. It may be the vacuum energy providing the Cosmological Constant in
Einstein's theory of General Relativity, or it may be a time-varying
energy field. The solution could require a fundamental revolution in
physics. Clusters of galaxies are the largest collapsed objects in the
Universe. Their formation and evolution is dominated by gravity, i.e. Dark
Matter, while their large scale distribution and number density depends on
the geometry of the Universe, i.e. Dark Energy. X-ray observations of
clusters provide information on the rate of expansion of the Universe, the
fraction of mass in visible matter and the amplitude of primordial
fluctuations that are the origin of clusters of galaxies and the whole
structure of the universe.
The main scientific goals are
- to detect the hot intergalactic medium of 100 thousand galaxy
clusters and groups and hot gas in filaments between clusters to map
out the large scale structure in the Universe for the study of
cosmic structure evolution,
- to detect systematically all obscured accreting Black Holes in
nearby galaxies and many (> 170000) new, distant active galactic
nuclei and
- to study in detail the physics of galactic X-ray source populations,
like pre-main sequence stars supernova remnants and X-ray binaries.
The telescope will consist of seven identical Wolter-1 mirror modules. Each module contains 54 nested mirror shells
in order to meet the required sensitivity. A novel detector system has
been developed by MPE on the basis of the successful XMM-Newton pn-CCD
technology.
|
| The eROSITA telescope on board SRG |
| Launch |
2013 |
| End of Mission |
t.b.d. |
| Status |
Phase C/D |
| MPE Participation |
|
project management, detectors, telescope
|
|
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B. Sanchez 
