The Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) is a staring grazing incidence X-ray telescope being flown all future GOES Weather satellites. It provides full solar disc images over the spectral range 10Å < λ < 60Å. Optimizing a field-weighted-average measure of resolution for this wide-angle application led to a new non-aplanatic hyperboloid-hyperboloid optical design. A complete systems engineering analysis of the "as-manufactured" telescope mirrors for the SXI telescope is described. This includes image degradation due to diffraction effects, geometrical aberrations (from both residual design errors and manufacturing figure errors), surface scatter effects, all of the miscellaneous errors in the mirror manufacturer's error budget tree, and a rigorous analysis of mosaic detector effects. Four flight models and a spare of the SXI telescope mirrors have been fabricated. The first of these SXI telescopes was launched on the NOAA GOES-13 satellite on May 24, 2006. This presentation first qualitatively illustrates the superb on-orbit performance of the GOES-13 SXI instrument and compares it to the experimental results from the prototype Wolter Type I instrument on GOES-12. Then quantitative information is extracted from the raw on-orbit images to provide experimental validation of the computationally intensive image quality predictions that include both surface scatter effects and detector effects.

Date Published: 20 September 2007
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 6689, Solar Physics and Space Weather Instrumentation II, 66890I (20 September 2007);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6689:
Solar Physics and Space Weather Instrumentation II
Silvano Fineschi; Rodney A. Viereck, Editor(s)