
X-ray telescopes need to have mirrors that are made of material that will reflect an X-ray photon and need to be oriented such that the X-rays hit the mirror at that grazing incidence. The angles that can bounce an X-ray off a mirror like that are called "grazing incidence." Mirror shells for X-ray telescopes can be built, with the same degree of complexity. However, if an X-ray just barely glances the surface of the mirror then it will be reflected, behaving just as an optical photon would. This was adopted for the Solar X-ray Imager telescope. If you shot a beam of X-rays directly at a mirror, most of them would pass right through they wouldn't even see that the mirror was there.Ī traditional telescope's orientation of lenses and mirrors just won't work for X-ray astronomy. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, used x-rays to detect the spectral signatures of zinc and nickel in Martian rocks. However, X-rays are so energetic (and have such a small wavelength) that they tend to pass through most things, including mirrors. X-ray telescopes focus x-rays onto a detector using grazing incidence mirrors (just as bullets ricochet when they hit a wall at a grazing angle). Telescopes like Hubble take images of objects in the cosmos. Galileo revolutionized astronomy when he applied the telescope to the study of extraterrestrial bodies in the early. It provides a means of collecting and analyzing radiation from celestial objects, even those in the far reaches of the universe. The telescope is undoubtedly the most important investigative tool in astronomy. Origin, Evolution & Destiny of the Universe. telescope, device used to form magnified images of distant objects. Cameras use lenses to focus light onto a detector (like CCDs or film) to capture a picture. What the 'X-ray universe' refers to, how this is studied and why it is important to scientific research. People wear glasses and contact lenses to correct their vision. In fact, lenses are all around us everyday. Interferometer arrays produced the first extremely high-resolution images using aperture synthesis at radio, infrared and optical wavelengths. In order to get above the Earths atmosphere. New telescopes were launched into space, and began observing the universe in the infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as observing cosmic rays. After all, scientists focus light all the time. An X-ray telescope (XRT) is a telescope that is designed to observe remote objects in the X-ray spectrum. Silicon pore optics have been proposed earlier 1 as modular optical X-ray units in large Wolter-I telescopes 2 that would match effective area and resolution requirements imposed by. Then they were coated with the highly reflective rare metal, iridium.Creating a telescope to image and focus X-rays might seem like it should be an easy task. The purpose of the Hubble, the most complex and sensitive optical telescope ever made, is to study the cosmos from low-Earth orbit for 15 years or more. Thus, we have radio telescopes, and X-ray telescopes, and even gamma-ray telescopes. After the mirrors were carefully moved to California via an air-ride moving van, they were painstakingly cleaned-to the equivalent of at most one speck of dust on an area the size of your computer screen. Not to be outdone, the scientists and engineers at Optical Coating Laboratories, Inc., in Santa Rosa, California also surpassed expectations.

Imagine making the surface of the Earth so smooth that the highest mountain was less than two meters (78 inches) tall! On a much smaller scale, the scientists and engineers at Raytheon Optical Systems in Danbury, Connecticut accomplished an equivalent feat when they polished and ground the four pairs of Chandra mirrors to the smoothness of a few atoms. Credit: NASA/CXC/D.Berry Designing a telescope system to focus X-ray photons requires a radically different approach from traditional telescope systems. Thus they look more like glass barrels than the familiar dish shape of optical telescopes. The mirrors have to be exquisitely shaped and aligned nearly parallel to incoming X-rays. Likewise, just as bullets ricochet when they hit a wall at a grazing angle, so too will X-rays ricochet off mirrors. Because of their high-energy, X-ray photons penetrate into a mirror in much the same way that bullets slam into a wall. X-ray telescopes must be very different from optical telescopes. These are all blocked by the Earths atmosphere, but can. The Chandra telescope system consists of four pairs of mirrors and their support structure. Objects in the universe emit other electromagnetic radiation such as infrared.
