Astro-E2 is the
fifth Japanese
X-ray satellite devoted to observations of celestial X-ray
sources.
It carries five soft
X-ray
telescopes and one hard X-ray telescope. It is designed for "broad-band,
high-sensitivity,
high-resolution"
spectroscopy, ranging from soft X-rays up to gamma-rays (0.3 -
600 keV). Astro-E2
is
planned to be lauched in early 2005 from the Kagoshima Space Center
in
Japan. The Astro-E2
project
is managed by ISAS, collaborating with many Japanese universities
and US institutes.
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Astro-E2 XRT at the PANTER Test
Facility In August 2003 the calibration of the first Astro-E2 flight mirror is performed at the PANTER test facility.
Two weeks of calibration will concentrate on the following measurements:
Overall performance PSF Measurement of the effective area Stray light
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The Astro-E2 flight mirror has arrived at the PANTER long beam test facility. It is taken out from the transport container ready to be integrated into the vacuum chamber. In the moment the aperture is still protected by a acrylic glass cover. |
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The Astro-E2 mirror is now integrated into a rotation table and prepared to be moved into PANTER's vacuum chamber. |
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The mirror in its rotation table weighting ~50 kg is hooked on a crane to be moved into the vacuum chamber. This difficult maneuver is necessary because the mirror has to be moved over the already integrated detectors of the PANTER facility: A Position Sensitive Proportional Pounter (the flight spare model of the ROSAT PSPC) and a pn-CCD camera (the flight spare model of the XMM-Newton EPIC-pn camera) |
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It's done! The mirror slided safely over the two detectors, the PSPC to the left and the EPIC-pn to the right. |
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The mirror is finally in
position, mounted
on the manipulator table of the PANTER facility. To the left the so
called
"Gluecksrad" can be seen. It allows to illuminate individual sectors of
the mirror. In the background the circular entrance window (1m diameter) of the X-ray beam is visible. |
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The Astro-E2 X-ray mirror is now assembled for the calibration, together with the "Gluecksrad" (front, right) and the two imaging detectors PSPC (background, middle) and and EPIC-pn (background, left) inside the test chamber of the PANTER facility. |
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First Light at PANTER ! |
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The Astro-E2 calibration team busy at PANTER. |
