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Completed TRL 2 (started at 1, targeting 3)
X-ray mirrors used on current astrophysical satellites have sub-arcmin angular resolution and a physical diameter about tens of cm. This poses a serious practical problem for their calibration, which requires a parallel incident X-ray beam to approximate a celestial point source at infinite distance.
Our 1’ beam will be narrower than that achieved in the 100-m long X-ray beamline. In general, such a narrow-beam source would enable a much more practical end-to-end ground testing of future X-ray instruments, because the calibration source could be placed right next to the telescope, and therefore testing does not have to be done in the vacuum, i.e. a spacecraft end-to-end test (since X-rays of a few-keV energy can pass a few meters in the air). Such pencil-beam calibration sources would be cheap and easily manufactured with a design tailored to each particular mission as part of their hardware budget.
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