Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) is a
space telescope under development by
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
for launch in 2032. It is a NASA Probe mission concept designed for high angular resolution X-Ray imaging.
AXIS home page
/ref> The mission goals are to examine galaxies
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...
over cosmic time, feedback in galaxies, Black Hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravitation, gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other Electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts t ...
strong gravity, Dual AGN, the high redshift
In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and simultaneous increase in f ...
universe.
History
The Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS), a response to NASA's Astrophysics Probe Explorer ( APEX)
program.
Instruments
The X-ray grazing incident mirror would be developed by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...
and combines 10,000 mirror segments made from silicon
Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic tab ...
, grouped into 10 shells. The detector is an array of CCDs giving a field of view of about 15 arcseconds.
See also
* List of proposed space observatories
* International X-ray Observatory
References
External References
Axis home page
Overview paper
Space telescopes
X-ray telescopes
Proposed NASA space probes
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