Design study of telescope housing for the NeXT/XRT

摘要

We present a study on housing design for the X-ray telescopes (XRT) onboard the New Exploration X-ray Telescope (NeXT). The NeXT XRTs are larger than previous thin-foil XRTs. The XRT is required to have a sufficient stiffness in order to keep the high performance of the XRT in orbit. We performed a structure analysis of the virtual model of the NeXT XRT housing using the FEA software Marc. A virtual model of the NeXT XRT was designed based on the XRT of the SUMIT balloon experiment. From the structure analysis of the virtual model by Marc, we found that the displacement of the XRT housing is small. The maximum displacement is a few μm, which is satisfied with our goal of 10 μm. On the other hand, the alignment bars show a large displacement up to about 90 μm. This is caused because the alignment bars become longer, and the total weight of the thin foils increases due to the larger effective area. This analysis indicates that we have to use stiff alignment bars without reducing the effective area. This result is useful to design a proto-model of the XRT housing. We will examine the result of this FEA analysis by measuring the displacement of the proto-model.