Steven Rodney with Corbin Covault, Glenn Starkman & Craig Copi

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

Current X-Ray telescopes are not operating to their fullest potential in terms of angular resolution.  The x-ray diffraction limit for a 1-m aperture (such as CHANDRA’s) is about 0.3 milli-arcseconds, but the best resolution yet achieved is closer to 0.5 arcseconds. Planned x-ray telescopes will further sacrifice angular resolution to increase their x-ray collection.  The XOSS project is a proposal for a large sheet in space that will occult x-ray sources while an existing telescope observes them, dramatically increasing the angular resolution of the telescope. Some current concerns of the project are the optimization of the mask pattern and the actual angular resolution benefit conferred by the XOSS.  We will test various mask patterns using computer simulations of observations to feed our image reconstruction algorithm.  We will then create a scaled-down model of the XOSS with the actual mask patterns to create a real simulation of the imaging process.