PUMA Test Facility
With the PUMA facility MPE modernizes once again its former ZETA-Lab to meet
the challenges of forthcoming X-ray astronomy activities. The aim is to have
on-site a small high-technology test facility for universal purposes to
perform precise measurements on focal instrumentations of X-ray telescopes,
e.g. the absolute calibration of cooled semiconductor detectors or novel
type filters.
In the past MPE maintained at the
ZETA-Lab
a medium-sized facility for scattering low energy X-rays to investigate
components for X-ray telescopes, for X-ray cameras, and for monitoring
instruments. The employment spectrum of the facility reached from
methodological studies on probes for a range of suitable materials
over functionality tests of systems to calibrations of high-sensitive
measurement intruments.
The nearby sketch shows an overview of
the test facility.
A tunable source provides a bunch of X-rays with energies between
0.1 and 20 keV.
The following collimator system mounted inside a vaccum tube blinds out
a parallel X-ray beam from this bunch which can be scattered on test
specimen (e.g. mirrors, gratings, filters) inside the specimen chamber.
The scattered X-rays will be detected by a proportional counter in the
detector chamber.
Focalplane instruments can be calibrated in the experimental chamber.
The ZETA Test Facility, proved already since more than twenty years, was
always modernized and adapted to state of the art to meet the requirements
of progressive projects. In 1991 the data acquisition system was rebuilt
and connected to MPE's computer net.
Lastly a multi-target X-ray source was developed, installed, and calibrated
in 1995 to be able to measure the efficiency of new developed transmission
gratings.
The various projects performed at the ZETA test facility over the years
are compilated in the following table overview.
Measurement Programme at the ZETA Test Facility from 1977 to 1998
Project | Test Objects | Time Span |
Rocket Experiments | position sensitive proportional counter | 1977 - 1987 |
ROSAT | monitor mirrors, telescope mirror specimen, position sensitive proportional counter PSPC | 1977 - 1990 |
ROSAT/WFC | (WFC) | 1987 - 1990 |
EXOSAT | | 1980 - 1982 |
MIR-HEXE | | 1981 |
AXAF | efficiency measurement of transmission gratings | 1982 - 1996 |
SAX | | 1985 - 1994 |
JET-X | | 1990 - 1997 |
SOHO/CDS | surface contamination of control mirrors of the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS) | 1991 - 1994 |
XMM | filter for light suppression, functionality test of pn-CCDs for the EPIC camera | 1987 - 1998 |
ABRIXAS | functionality test of pn-CCDs, scattering properties of plane mirror samples | 1995 - 1998 |