As ESA headquarters in Paris celebrated the first birthday of its XMM-Newton X-ray space
observatory, astronomers were already planning the next generation of X-ray telescopes.
Lobster is on
the cards for the ESA lab on the International Space Station, due for launch in 2004. The X-ray telescope’s
new design was inspired by lobsters, which have eyes without lenses, and work by reflecting light from the
inside of a large number of square tubes arranged on the surface of a sphere.
The design will give an
instantaneous field of view of 180 ¥ 30° with a resolution of about 4 arc min. It
will be able to map the whole sky every 90 min – ideal for detecting transient events such as the X-ray output
from active galaxies and gamma-ray bursts.
In the US there are plans to build an X-ray interferometer.
A NASA team at the Goddard Space Flight Center has achieved 100 milliarc second resolution in the lab –
similar to the Hubble Space Telescope and five times as good as conventional X-ray telescopes.
