Julian Osborne highlights the recent success of the team in the Space Research Centre that is making the flight X-ray optic for the Chinese-French satellite SVOM.
The SVOM satellite will extend the work done by the Swift mission in characterising the enormous energies of the gamma-ray bursts, crucially extending measurements down to lower energies where new populations of GRBs may be discovered. GRB science has been a major activity of the Astrophysics group since before the launch of Swift in 2004. Leicester provided the X-ray camera for that mission and has made major contributions post-launch, including the new era-defining discoveries of the first gravitational wave – electromagnetic source and the first high energy neutrino – electromagnetic source.
This work is funded by a contract from the French Space Agency CNES. Work to get this involvement and subsequent contract took many years; the contract started in 2015.
The success is the X-ray verification of the world-first ever lobster X-ray mirror assembly destined for launch into orbit. This first X-ray image from the assembled optic was obtained from the test beam facility in the Physics basement at Leicester. It verifies the excellent X-ray focussing of the mirror assembly destined for launch in mid-2022.
Lobsters focus images in their eyes using curved plates of square pores with internally reflective sides. We have reproduced this optical arrangement to make a super-light-weight optic to provide X-ray focussing using thin glass plates with square pores just 40 microns across. While we have provided X-ray optics using such plates for the MIXS instrument now en route to Mercury, this SVOM optic is the first to use the lobster geometry.
This is very important to us, as in addition to the low mass it demonstrates the second great advantage of lobster optics – their extraordinarily wide field of view. A typical X-ray mirror can focus a small fraction of a square degree, but a lobster mirror can focus an arbitrarily large region; for example two 0.25 steradian FOV lobster modules are the baseline for the ESA mission candidate Theseus, due to be selected next year and to be launched in the 2030s.
Final delivery of the SVOM optic to CNES will occur in February next year after an extensive test campaign.
The work of making this lobster X-ray optic has been undertaken by a highly expert team under the engineering leadership of Jim Pearson and the project management of Paul Drum. They have received congratulations from CNES (and from me) on this great result.
The Leicester team includes: Tony Crawford, Paul Houghton, Charly Feldman, Chris Bicknell, Gillian Butcher, Duncan Ross, Roisin Speight, Phil Peterson, Dick Willingale, Alex Lodge, Harrison Grossman; with past input from: Jon Sykes, Val Aslanyan, Karoly Keresztes, Jim Campbell. The project is led by Julian Osborne, the other SVOM Co-Is are Paul O’Brien and Dick Willingale. None of this would have been possible without the pioneering leadership of the late SRC director, George Fraser.
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