Freiburg 2008 – scientific programme

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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 6: The Future of Space Research

EP 6.2: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 4, 2008, 09:00–09:30, KGI-Aula

The XEUS Mission — •Günther Hasinger — Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany

The X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy mission, XEUS, is Europe's next generation X-ray observatory, designed to address two of the four main questions posed in Cosmic Vision, namely: "What are the fundamental laws of the Universe? and, How did the Universe originate, and what is it made of?" In its goal to study the early Universe, XEUS is fully complementary to the major future ground- and space-based observatories, JWST, LISA, ALMA, ELT and SKA. XEUS will be placed into an L2 orbit and comprises a Mirror Spacecraft and a Detector Spacecraft flying in formation at a focal length of 35 m. The main requirement for XEUS is to provide an effective aperture of 5 m2 at 1 keV and an angular resolution <5", which is achieved using silicon micro-pore optics. There are five focal plane instruments. The cryogenic imaging spectrometer (NFI) uses an array of superconducting Transition Edge Sensors to give energy resolution of 2 to 6 eV FWHM, over the energy range 0.1-8 keV and an FoV of 1.6'. The Wide Field Imager (WFI), based on silicon pixel arrays, has a FoV of 7' and a fast readout. The Hard X-ray Imager (HXI) extends the energy range up to 40 keV. The High Time Resolution Spectrometer (HTRS) enables the study of sub-millisecond variations in bright X-ray sources. Finally, the X-ray POLarimeter (XPOL) will for the first time allow the diagnostic power of X-ray polarisation.