NewAthena reports progress in optics production and detector development for its X-ray telescope, suggesting advancements in angular resolution and energy range.
NewAthena is the next generation x-ray telescope being prepared by the European Space Agency (ESA) as L-class mission for adoption in 2027, with a planned launch date around 2038. NewAthena is a general purpose observatory that operates in an energy range from about 0.3 to 10 keV, features an optic with the largest collecting area ever studied and uses two detectors, one for high-spectral resolution imaging (X-ray Integral Field Unit X-IFU) and one for high count rate, moderate resolution spectroscopy over a large field of view (Wide Field Imager WFI). The 2.6m diameter optic with a 12m focal length and an effective area of more than 1 m² at 1keV can only be realized thanks to the development of Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) by ESA, cosine and its partners. SPO allows to build up the large lens from up to 600 mirror modules that combined achieve an angular resolution better than 9 arc-seconds. Building hundreds of such SPO mirror modules in a cost-efficient and timely manner is a formidable task and subject of a dedicated ESA technology development program. We present in this paper the status of the optics production and of the mass production ramp-up.
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