Observatory-class science with a low-cost EUV astronomy mission

摘要

The various demands on funding agencies make it difficult to sustain the level of expenditure required to provide thebroad range of space astronomy missions that the research community would like to have available. Multi-billionpound/dollar observatories such Chandra, XMM-Newton and HST have been enormously successful, but JWST has beendelayed and plans for an equivalent large X-ray mission seem to be on-hold. Furthermore, the medium size ESA andNASA missions provide only a small number of opportunities over the next decade. Much exciting and importantscience, by default, will not be done. If satellite mission costs could be reduced significantly, by a factor of 5-10, wewould open up a new parameter space of opportunity that is not currently offered by any agency. Significantimprovement in instrument technology coupled with simplification of optical systems and the development of efficient,high performance small satellite platforms and ground systems has led to the prospect of the development of some low-costopportunities. In this paper, we outline one such possible mission, based on a successful sounding rocket-bornepayload. This comprises a high throughput normal incidence extreme ultraviolet spectrometer, with the design adaptedfor accommodation on the SSTL 300 platform. We make use of a segmented diffraction grating to provide an overallwavelength coverage from ~170-260Å by tuning the multi-layers of the individual elements to different, overlappingranges. We outline the capability and science goals of the mission, and how they influence the design and operation ofthe satellite platform. We conclude with a discussion of how missions of this type operating both as constellations andas formation flying sparse apertures, could offer a scientifically viable alternative to monolothic 'great observatory'missions in the future.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.