XUV Wide Field Camera for ROSAT

The ROSAT project is an international collaboration between W.Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA. The satellite, due to be launched in February 1990, carries a payload of two co-aligned imaging telescopes: the German X-ray Telescope (XRT) which operates in the soft X-ray band (0.1-2 keV or 6-100 A) and the UK Wide Field Camera (WFC) which operates in the XUV band (0.02-0.2 keV or 60-600 A). ROSAT will perform two main tasks in its anticipated 2-4 year lifetime: a 6-month all-sky survey in the soft X-ray and XUV bands followed by a programme of pointed observations for detailed studies of thousands of individual targets. In this paper we review the design and performance of the WFC. The instrument is a grazing incidence telescope comprising a set of 3 nested, Wolter-Schwarzschild Type I, gold-coated, aluminium mirrors, with a microchannel plate detector at their common focus. Thin plastic and metal film filters define the wavelength passbands.© (1989) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.