Related papers: Re-testing the JET-X Flight Module No. 2 at the PA…
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi, launched on 2008 June 11, is a space telescope to explore the high energy gamma-ray universe. The instrument covers the energy range from 20 MeV to 300 GeV with greatly improved sensitivity and…
The Imaging Magnetograph eXperiment (IMaX) is a spectropolarimeter built by four institutions in Spain that flew on board the Sunrise balloon-borne telesocope in June 2009 for almost six days over the Arctic Circle. As a polarimeter IMaX…
The XIFU X-ray spectrometer instrument on the future Athena mission needs X-ray calibration sources to calibrate the gains of the individual detector pixels. For this purpose, electronically controlled Modulated X-ray Sources (MXS) are…
PoGOLite is a hard X-ray polarimeter operating in the 25-100 keV energy band. The instrument design is optimised for the observation of compact astrophysical sources. Observations are conducted from a stabilised stratospheric balloon…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has been designed for the direct detection and characterization of exoplanets and circumstellar disks. GPI is equipped with a dual channel polarimetry mode designed to take advantage of the inherently…
A proximity focusing ring imaging Cherenkov detector using aerogel as the radiator has been studied for an upgrade of the Belle detector at the KEK-B-factory. We constructed a prototype Cherenkov counter using a 4 x 4 array of 64-channel…
Scheduled for launch in 2030, the enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarization (eXTP) telescope is a Chinese space-based mission aimed at studying extreme conditions and phenomena in astrophysics. eXTP will feature three main payloads:…
The Gas Pixel Detector is a gas detector, sensitive to the polarization of X-rays, currently flying on-board IXPE - the first observatory dedicated to X-ray polarimetry. It detects X-rays and their polarization by imaging the ionization…
Gotthard-II is a silicon microstrip detector developed for the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL.EU). Its potential scientific applications include X-ray absorption/emission spectroscopy, hard X-ray high resolution single-shot…
X-ray polarimetry has great scientific potential and new experiments, such as X-Calibur, PoGOLite, XIPE, and GEMS, will not only be orders of magnitude more sensitive than previous missions, but also provide the capability to measure…
Because of their inherently high flux allowing the detection of clear signals, black hole X-ray binaries are interesting candidates for polarization studies, even if no polarization signals have been observed from them before. Such…
Several payloads for hard X-ray (20-600 keV) imaging with coded aperture telescopes have been developed for balloon flight observations of cosmic x-ray sources. We briefly review the characteristics of these, particularly the EXITE2 system.…
The First G-APD Cherenkov telescope (FACT) is the first telescope using silicon photon detectors (G-APD aka. SiPM). It is built on the mount of the HEGRA CT3 telescope, still located at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, and it is…
Well over 700 exoplanets have been detected to date. Only a handful of these have been observed directly. Direct observation is extremely challenging due to the small separation and very large contrast involved. Imaging polarimetry offers a…
The EPIC focal plane imaging spectrometers on XMM-Newton use CCDs to record the images and spectra of celestial X-ray sources focused by the three X-ray mirrors. There is one camera at the focus of each mirror; two of the cameras contain…
A dedicated in-vacuum X-ray detector based on the hybrid pixel PILATUS 1M detector has been installed at the four-crystal monochromator beamline of PTB at the electron storage ring BESSY II in Berlin. Due to its windowless operation, the…
We report on the first continuous, 80 day optical monitoring of the transitional millisecond pulsar PSR J1023+0038 carried out in mid-2017 with Kepler in the K2 configuration, when an X-ray subluminous accretion disk was present in the…
Current {\gamma}-ray telescopes based on photon conversions to electron-positron pairs, such as Fermi, use tungsten converters. They suffer of limited angular resolution at low energies, and their sensitivity drops below 1 GeV. The low…
IXPE is a Small Explorer mission that was launched at the end of 2021 to measure the polarization of X-ray emission from tens of astronomical sources. Its focal plane detectors are based on the Gas Pixel Detector, which measures the…
(Abridged) Context: In the previous paper in this series, we identified that a pentagonal arrangement of five telescopes, using a kernel-nulling beam combiner, shows notable advantages for some important performance metrics for a…