The NeXT (New X-ray Telescope/Non-thermal Energy eXploration Telescope) mission has been proposed in Japan as a successor to the Suzaku mission. NeXT has two major mission goals, one is to study the high-energy non-thermal Universe by utilizing the technology of focusing optics above 10 keV, and second is to recover science which should have been achieved by the XRS of Suzaku. The mission will feature multiple instruments covering the bandpass ranging from 0.5 keV to 300 keV. NeXT will carry two hard X-ray telescopes for a hard X-ray imager, two soft X-ray telescopes, one is for a soft X-ray spectrometer, and the other is for a soft X-ray imager. In the soft gamma-ray band up to ~ 300 keV, a narrow field-of-view Compton gamma-ray telescope utilizing several tens of layers of thin Si or CdTe detector will provide high resolution spectra with much higher sensitivity than present instruments, along with polarization information. The continuum sensitivity of the mission will reach several x 10^-8 photons/s/keV/cm² in the hard X-ray region and a few x 10^-7 photons/s/keV/cm² in the soft γ-ray region.

Date Published: 15 June 2006
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6266, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation II: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 62660D (15 June 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.670815

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6266:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation II: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray
Martin J. L. Turner; Günther Hasinger, Editor(s)