Upgrade of the thirty-meter x-ray pencil beam line at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science

The thirty-meter X-ray pencil beam line at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) was utilized for ground-based calibrations of X-ray telescopes (XRTs) onboard the ASTRO-D, the ASTRO-E and the ASTRO- E2 satellites. Recent upsizing or downsizing of XRT required upgrade of the ISAS beam line. We replaced a vacuum chamber in which the stages had been installed by a new cylindrical chamber whose diameter and length are 1.8 m and 11.3 m, respectively. Stages on which a telescope and detectors had been mounted were also replaced. At same time, a new CCD consists of 1240×1152 pixels whose size are 22.5×22.5 μm was introduced. The detector stage can be moved along the X-ray beam in the vacuum chamber, which allows us to change the distance between the sample and the detectors from 0.7 m to 9 m. The two stages can move in at least 500×500 mm2 of square in the plane normal to the X-ray beam. The pitching of some moving axes are measured at 60 arcsec at most. The others are no more than about 30 arcsec. From April 2013, the ASTRO-H Soft X-ray telescopes (SXTs) have been calibrated at the new ISAS beam line.

[1]  Hideyuki Mori,et al.  An X-ray calibration facility with a dynamical pencil beam for the post-Astro-E2 telescopes , 2003, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[2]  P. Serlemitsos,et al.  X-Ray Telescope Onboard Astro-E. II. Ground-Based X-Ray Characterization. , 2001, Applied optics.

[3]  T. Okajima,et al.  Revealing a detailed performance of the soft x-ray telescopes of the ASTRO-H mission , 2014, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[4]  Hideyuki Mori,et al.  Ground-based x-ray calibration of the Astro-H soft x-ray telescopes , 2014, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[5]  T. Okajima,et al.  A ground calibration of the engineering model of the SXT onboard ASTRO-H using the ISAS 30m pencil beam facility , 2012, Other Conferences.

[6]  Shunsaku Okada,et al.  The X-Ray Telescope onboard Suzaku , 2007 .

[7]  Hideyuki Mori,et al.  ASTRO-H Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) , 2011, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[8]  Hideyuki Mori,et al.  Soft x-ray calibration for the NeXT x-ray telescope , 2008, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[9]  Yoshiharu Namba,et al.  Characterization of the supermirror hard-x-ray telescope for the InFOCmuS balloon experiment. , 2002, Applied optics.

[10]  P. Serlemitsos,et al.  Characterization of the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics x-ray telescope: preflight calibration and ray tracing. , 1995, Applied optics.

[11]  Martin C. Weisskopf,et al.  Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO): overview , 1999, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[12]  Hideyo Kunieda,et al.  Thirty-meter X-ray pencil beam line at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science , 1993 .

[13]  Yoshitomo Maeda,et al.  Development of the Four-stage X-ray telescope (FXT) for the DIOS mission , 2014, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.