Chiumun Michelle Hui with Corbin Covault and Glenn Starkman

Simulations for the X-Ray Occulting Steerable Satellite (XOSS)

The angular resolution of current x-ray telescopes is 0.5 arcseconds at best, but the x-ray diffraction limit for a 1-meter aperture is about 3 milli -arcseconds. To achieve a higher angular resolution, the XOSS project proposes a large occulting satellite to be used in combination with existing or planned telescopes. Previous research by Steve Rodney has tested various occultation mask patterns and found that one-dimensional series of slits arranged as uniformly redundant arrays is most efficient to reconstruct 2D x-ray images. To demonstrate that lab work can be duplicated in the space environment, the configuration of the detector, mask, and source will be set up so that its scaling is comparable to that of Constellation-X, a x-ray telescope expected to launch by the end of the decade. Different signal-to-background ratios will be investigated to determine the effectiveness of the reconstruction technique when being used in actual observations.