Related papers: Use of a ray-tracing simulation to characterize gh…
FOXSI is a direct-imaging, hard X-ray (HXR) telescope optimized for solar flare observations. It detects hot plasma and energetic electrons in and near energy release sites in the solar corona via bremsstrahlung emission, measuring both…
The Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) sounding rocket payload flew for the second time on 2014 December 11. To enable direct Hard X-Ray (HXR) imaging spectroscopy, FOXSI makes use of grazing-incidence replicated focusing optics…
Optical images of transparent three-dimensional objects can be different from a replica of the object's cross section in the image plane due to refraction at the surface or in the body of the object. Simulations of the object's image are…
The imaging performance and sensitivity of an X-ray telescope when observing astrophysical sources are primarily governed by the optical design, geometrical uncertainties (figure errors, surface roughness, and mirror alignment…
Space telescopes for solar hard X-ray imaging provide observations made of sampled Fourier components of the incoming photon flux. The aim of this study is to design an image reconstruction method relying on enhanced visibility…
We study the nature of energy release and transfer for two sub-A class solar microflares observed during the second flight of the Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI-2) sounding rocket experiment on 2014 December 11. FOXSI is the…
Grazing incidence mirrors for X-ray astronomy are usually designed in the parabola-hyperbola (Wolter I) configuration. This design allows for optimal images on-axis, which however degrade rapidly with the off-axis angle. Mirror surfaces…
The Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) will look at solar flares across the hard X-ray window provided by the Solar Orbiter cluster. Similarly to the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), STIX is a…
Quantitative and analytical analysis of modulation process of the collimator is a great challenge, and is also of great value to the design and development of Fourier transform imaging telescopes. The Hard X-ray Imager (HXI), as one of the…
In-orbit experience has shown that soft protons are funneled more efficiently through focusing Wolter-type optics of X-ray observatories than simulations predicted. These protons can degrade the performance of solid-state X-ray detectors…
Spectroscopy focusing array (SFA) and Polarimetry focusing array (PFA) are the two major payloads of enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry mission (eXTP). Nested Wolter-\RNum{1} X-ray mirror module is implemented in SFA and PFA to achive…
To obtain the best possible scientific result, astronomers must understand the properties of the available instrumentation well. This is important both when designing new instruments and when using existing instruments close to the limits…
Optical alignment and testing of the Integrated Science Instrument Module of the James Webb Space Telescope is underway. We describe the Optical Telescope Element Simulator used to feed the science instruments with point images of precisely…
Stray light in X-ray telescopes is a well-known issue. Unlike rays focused via a double reflection by usual grazing-incidence geometries such as the Wolter-I, stray rays coming from off-axis sources are reflected only once by either the…
Context. The Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) is one of 6 remote sensing instruments on-board Solar Orbiter. It provides hard X-ray imaging spectroscopy of solar flares by sampling the Fourier transform of the incoming flux.…
Optical modules for X-ray telescopes comprise several double-reflection mirrors operating in grazing incidence. The concentration power of an optical module, which determines primarily the telescope's sensitivity, is in general expressed by…
We are working on the development of a method for optimizing wide-field X-ray telescope mirror prescriptions, including polynomial coefficients, mirror shell relative displacements, and (assuming 4 focal plane detectors) detector placement…
Ray tracing is a widely used technique for modeling optical systems, involving sequential surface-by-surface computations, which can be computationally intensive. We propose Ray2Ray, a novel method that leverages implicit neural…
The rapid development of X-ray astronomy has been made possible by widely deploying X-ray focusing telescopes on board many X-ray satellites. Geant4 is a very powerful toolkit for Monte Carlo simulations and has remarkable abilities to…
We propose and design novel axisymmetric focusing mirrors, known as Wolter optics, for small-angle neutron scattering instruments. Ray-tracing simulations show that using the mirrors can result in more than an order-of-magnitude increase in…