The International X-ray Observatory
Abstract
The International X-ray Observatory (IXO) is a joint ESA-JAXA-NASA effort to address fundamental and timely questions in astrophysics: What happens close to a black hole? How did supermassive black holes grow? How does large scale structure form? What is the connection between these processes? To address these questions IXO will employ optics with 3 sq m collecting area and 5 arc sec angular resolution - 20 times more collecting area at 1 keV than any previous X-ray observatory. Focal plane instruments will deliver a 100-fold increase in effective area for high-resolution spectroscopy, deep spectral imaging over a wide field of view, unprecedented polarimetric sensitivity, microsecond spectroscopic timing, and high count rate capability. The mission is being planned for launch in 2021 to an L2 orbit, with a five-year lifetime and consumables for 10 years.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1001.2843,
title = {The International X-ray Observatory},
author = {Nicholas E. White and Arvind Parmar and Hideyo Kunieda and Kirpal Nandra and Takaya Ohashi and Jay Bookbinder},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.2843},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures, for conference "X-ray Astronomy 2009 Present status, multi-wavelength approach and future perspectives"