HERO will provide new view of X-ray universe
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of X-ray universe
The production method coats a form, called a mandrel, with the right material and then pops the two apart. The resulting mirror only needs a little finishing work before going into the telescope, and the mandrel is reused to make another mirror. Tests with the first HERO mirrors are encouraging.
Right: Chet Speegle, an optical engineer with Raytheon, shows off the first HERO mandrel produced at NASA/Marshall.
"We have tested our first 6-meter focal-length mirror," said Brian Ramsey, an X-ray astronomer at NASA/Marshall. "We got 33 arc-seconds resolution, a result we were very pleased with. This was our very first one, and I'm confident that we can do even better on subsequent mirrors."
Resolution is a measure of how much detail a telescope will show. For comparison, the apparent diameter of the Moon is about 1,860 arc-seconds, and the human eye has a resolution of about 60 arc-seconds. HERO's first test mirror would be able to see details as small as33 arc-sec (at what astronomers call half-power diameter), about 1/60th the apparent diameter of the Moon, or twice as fine as the human eye can see.
But that's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison since HERO will observe objects, both in our galaxy and beyond, that emit most of their energy in x-rays, far more energetic than what the human eye or even the Hubble Space Telescope can see. Objects from white dwarves and neutron stars to distant objects like quasars do some of their most interesting work in this part of the spectrum.
X-ray astronomy started in the 1960s and has developed very quickly. The first satellite devoted to X-ray astronomy, named Uhuru, was launched in 1970 and was able to map a few hundred bright sources.
Left: The point is just that: A point-spread function test of a HERO mirror shows that most of the X-rays from a point source are focused as a point.
We are now poised to have large orbiting Observatories, such as Chandra, with a hundred thousand times the sensitivity of Uhuru, that can 'see' literally millions of galactic and extra-galactic sources.
"However, their mirrors work at low energies, less than 10 keV (10,000 electron volts) and we want to go beyond that," said Ramsey. By comparison, visible light has an energy of 1 to 2 eV.
"The region above 10 keV is extremely interesting. It's the transition region between thermal processes, where temperatures largely control emissions, and mechanisms like synchrotron radiation, X-rays given off by electrons spiraling along intense magnetic fields, and Compton scattering, when low-energy photons hit high-energy electrons and get boosted to X-rays."
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"Focusing is an extremely powerful tool that has revolutionized X-ray astronomy at lower energies," explained Ramsey. "By concentrating the X rays onto a very small area of the detector we prevent the signal from being overwhelmed by the background. This gives us an enormous increase in signal to noise. For example, the Chandra observatory and the detectors on Uhuru had roughly the same collecting area, so they would collect the same number of x rays. Chandra is 100,000 times more powerful because it focuses them to an extremely tiny point and this reduces background almost to zero."
X-rays are challenging to focus because they pass through most materials. However, if they strike a smooth surface at a shallow angle, the surface acts as a mirror. This "grazing incidence reflection" is why light glares off a piece of glass if you hold it almost edge-on.
It's all done with mirrors
In X-ray astronomy, the effect is put to work with mirrors that resemble tubes. The Chandra X-ray Observatory uses four primary mirrors nested within each other, and four nested secondary mirrors lined up precisely behind the primaries.
Left: Cutaway diagram of the mirrors for the Chandra X-ray Observatory is similar to how a series of HERO mirrors would be nested and aligned. A key difference is that HERO mirrors would be truncated cones rather than based on curves from cross-sections of cones.
While Chandra will give us new vistas in the X-ray astronomy universe, with superb images in soft X rays, its vision fades sharply at higher energies - near 10 keV - where the angle of incidence must be ever shallower in order to be effective.
In order to get significant collecting areas at higher energies, many shallow-angle mirrors of successively smaller diameters must be nested. Each mirror has to be light weight and very thin, because there are many of them and they need to be packed tightly. This precludes the use of thick polished glass which would be too bulky and way too costly to fabricate in large numbers.
Above: HERO mirrors are sections of cones that are so shallow that they look more like tubes. Here, the angles of the cone sections - called frustra - are exaggerated to illustrate how the primary-secondary set takes parallel X-rays that enter the telescope and focuses them towards a detector behind the mirrors. Not shown is a slotted mask, just in front of the telescope, to admit only X-rays that will strike the shallow internal slope.
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" This is a good technique and real progress is being made, but we'd like better resolution than these look like providing" commented Ramsey.
That's where HERO comes to the rescue for future missions. Ramsey and colleagues working in the Science and Technology Directorate at NASA/Marshall, together with Darell Engelhaupt of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, have utilized a replication method for manufacturing multiple high-quality copies of a mirror.
"In these mirrors, we're using two straight cones instead of curved surfaces," Ramsey explained. "This means the mirrors will provide images that are just a little out of focus, but it doesn't matter. The effect is very tiny, much smaller than the average resolution we expect to achieve. The departure is insignificant to the imaging properties."
It also simplifies manufacture with the replication method - the R in HERO - that Ramsey and Englehaupt have utilized.
Taking a spin, then taking a bath
They start with an aluminum mandrel - a mold like the centerpiece of an angelfood cake - that is machined into part of a double shallow cone (called frustra since these cones don't reach a point). It is coated with nickel and superpolished to a roughness of less than half a nanometer, about the thickness of a few atoms. Ramsey said that Raytheon engineer Chet Speegle has refined the polishing process from three months to one month for a mandrel.
"It's what's called a glassy nickel," Ramsey explained. "The shell material behaves more like a ceramic than a metal. It's brittle and will not bend. That's ideal for a mirror because it means it does not permanently deform it as pure nickel would. We developed this material to satisfy future needs for large-area, high-resolution X-ray optics."
The electroforming takes about three days but may be shortened to less than a day as the process is improved. Further, several mandrels can be electroplated at a time, so a complete set of nested mirrors could be made at once out of the same bath.
Right: After the new mirror has been plated on the mandrel, the two are separated by cooling them with nitrogen. The mandrel contracts slightly more than the replicated mirror, and the two pop apart. Credit: NASA/Marshall
Finally, the mandrel is cooled so it contracts and the electroplated shell pulls away, forming the new mirror, something that conventional electroformed pure-nickel mirrors would not survive without deforming. The HERO mirror is then vacuum coated with iridium, a hard reflective metal, and is ready for assembly into a nested array to make a telescope.
The HERO team recently completed its first mirror and tested it in the 100-meter (328 ft) beam tube at MSFC. Based on the accuracy and finish of the mandrel, Martin Smithers of NASA/Marshall's optical design team predicted that the mirror would provide a resolution of 28 arc-seconds. It achieved 33.
| Web Links |
| The Uhuru Satellite -- the first earth-orbiting mission dedicated entirely to celestial X-ray astronomy. Chandra Science -- Science@NASA's look at Chandra, the soon-to-be-launched Great Observatory operating in the X-ray region. Chandra X-ray Observatory Center home page, with links to education, news, and technical pages. Chandra Project Science is managed at NASA/Marshall, has links to individual instruments and the prime contractor. X-ray astrophysics branch at NASA/Marshall conducts a broad range of research and technology work. |
Ramsey now is aiming for the first HERO test flight aboard a balloon-borne observatory jointly operated with Harvard College Observatory. Speegle is completing those mandrels now. At the same time, other teams in the Science and Technology Directorate are developing the rest of the HERO flight package. Lead Engineer Jeff Apple and software lead Kurt Dietz are developing the observatory pointing and data handling systems, while Cheryl Alexander is completing a unique star-tracker camera that will give fine pointing information during both day and night observations. In parallel with this, Robert Austin of the Universities Space Research Association is developing special detectors, containing rare gas at high pressures, that will sit at the focus of each mirror module.
Multiple mirrors for a better view
NASA/Marshall's payload on the first flight will comprise two 3-meter (10-ft) focal length telescopes, each with a pair of nested mirrors.
A completed HERO mirror (right) and its housing. X-rays enter through the narrow slots at the end of the housing. Credit: NASA/Marshall
Beyond that, the HERO team hopes for a 10-day flight on a long-duration balloon, and, eventually to fly the payload on ultra-long-duration flights as NASA is developing the capability to fly payloads on 100-200-day missions with super-pressure balloons. "This offers the exciting possibility of balloon flights competing with satellites at a fraction of the cost," said Ramsey. "We can do this in hard x-rays as the remaining atmosphere is reasonably transparent, so we get good observations, just currently limited in time. A 100 to 200-day flight would offer unprecedented sensitivity, and carry the X-ray optics 'revolution' into this important, yet relatively unexplored, energy range."
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Author: Dave Dooling Curator: Linda Porter NASA Official: Gregory S. Wilson |
