ABRIXAS

ABRIXAS was a national X-ray satellite with seven 27-fold nested Wolter-1 telescopes, sharing one 6 × 6 cm2 pn-CCD detector (copy of the EPIC camera developed for XMM-Newton) in the focus. Launched on April 28, 1999 ABRIXAS was supposed to perform the first complete all-sky survey with imaging telescopes in the medium energy X-ray range (0.5 - 15 keV). A three-years scanning mission was planned to detect at least 10.000 new hard X-ray sources obscured by gas and dust clouds and to study diffuse X-ray sources and bright time-variable X-ray sources.
Due to a failure of the on-board batteries, the mission ended already few days after launch without any scientific data taken.

Satellite
Launch April 28, 1999
End of Mission July 12, 1999
Status total loss

MPE Participation:

  • Satellite
  • Telescopes
  • Detectors

 

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