HiZ-GUNDAM is a future satellite mission for gamma-ray burst observations. One of the mission instruments is the wide-field X-ray monitor with a field of view (FoV) of 0.5 steradian at 0.4 to 4.0 keV, consisting of Lobster Eye Optics (LEO) and focal-imaging pixel sensors. LEOs need to be spatially well-aligned to achieve both a wide FoV and fine accuracy in determining the location of X-ray transients. An alignment method is being investigated with visible light and shape measurements. We developed a titanium frame for positioning two LEO segments and estimated visible light on LEOs. We will report development of the alignment method.
HiZ-GUNDAM is a future satellite mission which will lead the time-domain astronomy and the multi-messenger astronomy through observations of high-energy transient phenomena. A mission concept of HiZ-GUNDAM was approved by ISAS/JAXA, and it is one of the future satellite candidates of JAXA’s medium-class mission. We are in pre-phase A (before pre-project) and elaborating the mission concept, mission/system requirements for the launch in the late 2020s. The main themes of HiZ-GUNDAM mission are (1) exploration of the early universe with high-redshift gamma-ray bursts, and (2) contribution to the multi-messenger astronomy. HiZ-GUNDAM has two kinds of mission payload. The wide field X-ray monitors consist of Lobster Eye optics array and focal imaging sensor, and monitor ~1 steradian field of view in 0.5 – 4 keV energy range. The near infrared telescope has an aperture size 30 cm in diameter, and simultaneously observes four wavelength bands between 0.5 – 2.5 μm. In this paper, we introduce the mission overview of HiZ-GUNDAM.
Lobster eye optics (LEO) is an optics composed of many pores aligned along a sphere. Since the LEO can cover a wide field of view with good sensitivity in soft X-rays, it makes an ideal telescope to search for interesting transient sources such as high redshift gamma-ray bursts, electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources, and so on. We obtained two LEOs of different specifications manufactured by Photonis inc. (hereafter PLEO) and NNVT inc. (hereafter NLEO) and evaluated their X-ray performance. We confirmed that both LEOs focus parallel X-rays and make an image containing a center spot, cross arms, and scattering components at the focal plane, as suggested by Angel (1979). The full widths at half maximum of the measured point spread functions are ∼ 11′ (PLEO) and ∼ 4 ′ (NLEO). The effective areas of the central component at 1.5 keV are 1.37 cm2 (PLEO) and 2.58 cm2 (NLEO). Based on our developed simulator calibrated using our X-ray measurements, the position accuracy of the PLEO is expected to be less than 1′ if the number of detected photons is more than 500.
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