X-ray telescope
The first X-ray picture of the Sun from a rocket-borne telescope was taken by John V. Lindsay of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and collaborators in 1963.
The first orbiting X-ray telescope flew on Skylab in the early 1970s and recorded more than 35,000 full-disk images of the Sun over a 9-month period.
[4] The Chandra X-Ray Observatory was launched by NASA in 1999 and is operated for more than 25 years in a high elliptical orbit, returning thousands 0.5 arc-second images and high-resolution spectra of all kinds of astronomical objects in the energy range from 0.5 to 8.0 keV.
[6] The Lobster-Eye X-ray Satellite was launched on 25 July 2020 by CNSA making it is the first in-orbit telescope to utilize the lobster-eye imaging technology of ultra-large field of view imaging to search for dark matter signals in the x-ray energy range.
[8] The Space Variable Objects Monitor observatory launched on 22 June 2024 is directed towards studying the explosions of massive stars and analysis of gamma-ray bursts.
[9] A soft X-ray solar imaging telescope is on board the GOES-13 weather satellite launched using a Delta IV from Cape Canaveral LC37B on May 24, 2006.
[11] A simple parabolic mirror was originally proposed in 1960 by Riccardo Giacconi and Bruno Rossi, the founders of extrasolar X-ray astronomy.
The German physicist Hans Wolter showed in 1952 that the reflection off a combination of two elements, a paraboloid followed by a hyperboloid, would work far better for X-ray astronomy applications.
In addition, the Type I design offers the possibility of nesting several telescopes inside one another, thereby increasing the useful reflecting area.
Mirrors based on this construction work on the basis of total reflection of light at grazing incidence.
[14] To reflect at this level, glass layers were multi-coated with tungsten (W)/silicon (Si) or platinum (Pt)/silicon carbide(SiC).
This design gives results that are less sensitive than focusing optics; also the imaging quality and identification of source position is much poorer.
Though this design offers a larger field of view and can be employed at higher energies, where grazing incidence optics become ineffective.
X-rays has a huge span in wavelength (~8 nm - 8 pm), frequency (~50 PHz - 50 EHz) and energy (~0.12 - 120 keV).
A proportional counter is a type of gaseous ionization detector that counts particles of ionizing radiation and measures their energy.
The scintillation X-ray detector were used on Vela 5A and its twin Vela 5B;[28] the X-ray telescope onboard OSO 4 consisted of a single thin NaI(Tl) scintillation crystal plus phototube assembly enclosed in a CsI(Tl) anti-coincidence shield.
The central crystal was 0.635 cm thick, had a sensitive area of 70 cm2, and was viewed from behind by a pair of photomultiplier tubes.
[25] The KONUS-B instrument consisted of seven detectors distributed around the spacecraft that responded to photons of 10 keV to 8 MeV energy.
[30] On board the Granat Observatory were four WATCH instruments that could localize bright sources in the 6 to 180 keV range to within 0.5° using a Rotation Modulation Collimator.
OSO 8 had on board a Graphite Crystal X-ray Spectrometer, with energy range of 2-8 keV, FOV 3°.
[25] The X-ray spectrometer aboard ISEE-3 was designed to study both solar flares and cosmic gamma-ray bursts over the energy range 5-228 keV.
