Silicon pore optics is a technology developed to enable future large area X-ray telescopes, such as the
International X-ray Observatory (IXO), a candidate mission in the ESA Space Science Programme 'Cosmic
Visions 2015-2025'. IXO uses nested mirrors in Wolter-I configuration to focus grazing incidence X-ray photons
on a detector plane. The IXO optics will have to meet stringent performance requirements including an effective
area of >2.5 m2 at 1.25 keV and >0.65 m2 at 6 keV and angular resolution better than 5 arc seconds. To achieve
the collecting area requires a total polished mirror surface area of ~1300 m2 with a surface roughness better than
0.5 nm rms. By using commercial high-quality 12" silicon wafers which are diced, structured, wedged, coated,
bent and stacked, the stringent performance requirements of IXO can be attained without any costly polishing
steps. Two of these stacks are then assembled into a co-aligned mirror module, which is a complete X-ray
imaging system. Included in the mirror module are the isostatic mounting points, providing a reliable interface to
the telescope. Hundreds of such mirror modules are finally integrated into petals, and mounted onto the
spacecraft to form an X-ray optic of approximately 4 m in diameter.
In this paper we will present the silicon pore optics mass manufacturing process and latest X-ray test results of
mirror modules mounted in flight configuration.
This paper was published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7732
