A multichannel piezo driver for active mirrors in X-ray telescopes

X-ray astronomy is gaining importance for studying X-ray space sources such as single and binary stars, neutron stars, supernovae and black holes. Due to atmospheric absorption, X-ray telescopes must operate in space on satellites. Among the causes limiting the resolution of modern telescopes are distortions in mirrors shape. An innovative approach for X-ray mirrors aims at correcting the shape errors by means of piezo-ceramic actuators glued to the back of the mirrors, thus creating an “active mirror”. In order to test the viability of shape correction, we fabricated [1] a prototype of a thin glass active mirror, sized 20 cm x 20 cm with a 400 um thickness (Fig. 1). The mirror can allocate…