Highly damped exactly constrained mounting of an x-ray telescope

Instruments and machines requiring very high stability should be isolated from their normally less stable environment. Exact constraint mounting using six, single-constraint flexures provides a stiff connection between the instrument and its environment while isolating the instrument from low frequency deformations of the environment, such as thermal expansion. Higher frequency disturbances, however, transfer through the flexures and excite vibration modes of the instrument. Traditionally, passive or active vibration isolation is employed to attenuate environmental disturbances reaching the instrument. However, strict alignment requirements for the instrument preclude the use of low-frequency isolation, unless active methods are used. Therefore, the solution is to provide damping in parallel with the flexures to reduce the vibration amplitudes of the instrument. Flexures concentrate strain energy in blades making them excellent candidates for damping treatments. A properly designed damping treatment across the flexures can provide as much as 8% to 10% viscous damping to the isolation modes and will also help attenuate the instrument vibration modes. Thus, through the use of six damped single-constraint flexures the instrument's requirements for stability, alignment, stress, and vibration may be met. An application of this approach will be employed on the Reflection Grating Array (RGA) for the X-ray Multi-mirror Mission for the European Space Agency. The RGA is an array of 200 diffraction gratings aligned to sub-micron and sub-arc-second tolerances relative to each other. This produces a coherent wavefront for spectrum analysis. The launch vehicle will be an Ariane 5 scheduled for 1998.