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Session 72 - Proposed Space Missions.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Hard X-Ray Telescope (HXT) mission concept contains focusing telescopes that collectively, observe simultaneously from the ultraviolet to 100 keV and in several narrow bands extending to 1 MeV. In pointed observations HXT is expected to have an order of magnitude more sensitivity and much finer angular resolution in the 10 to 100 keV band than all current and currently planned future missions, and considerably more sensitivity for detecting narrow lines in the 100 keV to 1 MeV regime. The detectors are small, cooled arrays of relatively low mass with very good energy resolution and some polarization sensitivity.
HXT contains two types of hard X-ray telescopes. One type, called the modular modular telescope (MMT) utilizes a novel type of multilayer coating and small graze angles to extend the regime of focusing to 100keV. There is a two stage imaging detector at each focus, a CCD for X-rays < 10 keV followed down stream by either a germanium strip array or cadmium zinc telluride array for 10-100 keV X-rays.
The other type of telescope, called the Laue Crystal Telescope (LCT) is a single adjustable array of several hundred Ge crystals that focus by Laue scattering. Individual picomotors adjust the angle of each crystal to diffract photons of a fixed energy to the same point along the optic axis where they converge upon a movable array of cooled germanium detectors. The LCT will have high sensitivity for detecting narrow X-ray lines of known energy such as those expected from Type 1 supernova.
The UV monitor is a three telescope system that provides coverage in the ultraviolet band for study of time correlated changes across the broad electromagnetic spectrum of an AGN such as are expected in ``reverberation'' models. A WWW page will be created as a public bulletin board. This work is supported by NASA grant NAG8-1194
