Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Performance Testing of a Large-Format Reflection Grating Prototype for a Suborbital Rocket Payload |
| Authors: |
Donovan, Benjamin D., McEntaffer, Randall L., DeRoo, Casey T., Tutt, James H., Grisé, Fabien, Eichfel, Chad M., Gall, Oren Z., Burwitz, Vadim, Hartner, Gisela, Pelliciari, Carlo, La Caria, Marlis-Madeleine |
| Publication Year: |
2020 |
| Collection: |
Astrophysics |
| Subject Terms: |
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| More Details: |
The soft X-ray grating spectrometer on board the Off-plane Grating Rocket Experiment (OGRE) hopes to achieve the highest resolution soft X-ray spectrum of an astrophysical object when it is launched via suborbital rocket. Paramount to the success of the spectrometer are the performance of the $>250$ reflection gratings populating its reflection grating assembly. To test current grating fabrication capabilities, a grating prototype for the payload was fabricated via electron-beam lithography at The Pennsylvania State University's Materials Research Institute and was subsequently tested for performance at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics' PANTER X-ray Test Facility. Bayesian modeling of the resulting data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling indicated that the grating achieved the OGRE single-grating resolution requirement of $R_{g}(\lambda/\Delta\lambda)>4500$ at the 94% confidence level. The resulting $R_g$ posterior probability distribution suggests that this confidence level is likely a conservative estimate though, since only a finite $R_g$ parameter space was sampled and the model could not constrain the upper bound of $R_g$ to less than infinity. Raytrace simulations of the system found that the observed data can be reproduced with a grating performing at $R_g=\infty$. It is therefore postulated that the behavior of the obtained $R_g$ posterior probability distribution can be explained by a finite measurement limit of the system and not a finite limit on $R_g$. Implications of these results and improvements to the test setup are discussed.
Comment: 25 pages, 16 figures, preprint of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation \copyright 2020 [copyright World Scientific Publishing Company] [https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/jai] |
| Document Type: |
Working Paper |
| Access URL: |
http://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01100 |
| Accession Number: |
edsarx.2011.01100 |
| Database: |
arXiv |
