0000000000814733
AUTHOR
B. Ramsey
The NHXM observatory
Exploration of the X-ray sky has established X-ray astronomy as a fundamental astrophysical discipline. While our knowledge of the sky below 10 keV has increased dramatically (∼8 orders of magnitude) by use of grazing incidence optics, we still await a similar improvement above 10 keV, where to date only collimated instruments have been used. Also ripe for exploration is the field of X-ray polarimetry, an unused fundamental tool to understand the physics and morphology of X-ray sources. Here we present a novel mission, the New Hard X-ray Mission (NHXM) that brings together for the first time simultaneous high-sensitivity, hard-X-ray imaging, broadband spectroscopy and polarimetry. NHXM will…
XIPE: the x-ray imaging polarimetry explorer
XIPE, the X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer, is a mission dedicated to X-ray Astronomy. At the time of writing XIPE is in a competitive phase A as fourth medium size mission of ESA (M4). It promises to reopen the polarimetry window in high energy Astrophysics after more than 4 decades thanks to a detector that efficiently exploits the photoelectric effect and to X-ray optics with large effective area. XIPE uniqueness is time-spectrally-spatially- resolved X-ray polarimetry as a breakthrough in high energy astrophysics and fundamental physics. Indeed the payload consists of three Gas Pixel Detectors at the focus of three X-ray optics with a total effective area larger than one XMM mirror bu…
High Energy, High Resolution X-Ray Spectroscopy: Microcalorimeters For Nuclear Line Astrophysics
We introduce focusing optics and microcalorimeter spectroscopy to nuclear line emission astrophysics with a balloon payload concept called, B‐MINE. It is designed to probe the deepest regions of a supernova explosion by detecting 44Ti emission at 68 keV with spatial and spectral resolutions that are sufficient to determine the velocity distribution of the 44Ti emitting region. B‐MINE has a thin plastic foil telescope multilayered to maximize the reflectivity in a 20 keV band centered at 68 keV and a microcalorimeter array optimized for the same energy band. This combination provides a reduced background, an energy resolution of 50 eV and a 3σ sensitivity in 106 s of 6 × 10−8 ph cm−2 s−1 at …
XIPE: the X-ray imaging polarimetry explorer
arXiv:1309.6995v1.-- et al.