Arcus X-ray telescope performance and alignment
Hans Moritz G\"unther, Peter Cheimets, Eric D. Miller, Casey DeRoo,, Randall K. Smith, Andrew Ptak, Ralf K. Heilmann

TL;DR
Arcus is a proposed high-resolution X-ray and UV spectroscopic mission utilizing innovative optics and alignment techniques, with detailed performance analysis and alignment tolerances.
Contribution
This paper details the design, alignment, and performance evaluation of the Arcus X-ray and UV spectrographs, including ray-tracing studies and background estimates.
Findings
Achieves spectral resolving power >3000 in 12-50 Å band
Most alignment tolerances can be met with mechanical adjustments
Provides estimates of on-orbit background noise
Abstract
Arcus is a concept for a probe class mission to deliver high-resolution FUV and X-ray spectroscopy. For X-rays, it combines cost-effective silicon pore optics (SPO) with high-throughput critical-angle transmission (CAT) gratings to achieve in a bandpass from 12-50 Angstroem. We show in detail how the X-ray and the UV spectrographs (XRS and UVS) on Arcus will be aligned to each other. For XRS we present ray-tracing studies to derive performance characteristics such as the spectral resolving power and effective area, study the effect of misalignments on the performance, and conclude that most tolerances can be achieved with mechanical means alone. We also present an estimate of the expected on-orbit background.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAstrophysical Phenomena and Observations · Particle Detector Development and Performance · Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation
