Mirror Integration Process for High Precision, Lightweight X-Ray Optics

Next generation X-ray telescopes in the coming decades require optics with high angular resolution and large collecting area at a fixed cost and budget. X-ray optics, unlike traditional normal incidence optics in optical and infrared telescopes, require many times the polished surface area to obtain an equivalent collecting area due to the nature of glancing incidence optics necessary to reflect higher energy X-ray photons. The Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is developing a manufacturing process capable of producing sub 5 arc-second half-power diameter (HPD) angular resolution optics in the near term, with the long term goal of producing optics for an X-ray telescope in the next 10 years with sub 1 arc-second HPD angular resolution. By parallelizing the production, integration, and testing of X-ray mirrors in separate modules, thousands of precisely formed X-ray mirror segments are assembled into one Mirror Assembly (MA), lowering the cost per collecting area by orders of magnitude compared to previous X-ray telescopes with similar resolution like the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Novel uses of kinematic mounts, precision actuators, and epoxy fixes each X-ray mirror segment to the submicron level with the sufficient strength to survive rocket launch.