Mass production of silicon pore optics for ATHENA

Eric Wille; Marcos Bavdaz; Maximilien Collon

doi:10.1117/12.2232392

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11 July 2016 Mass production of silicon pore optics for ATHENA

Eric Wille, Marcos Bavdaz, Maximilien Collon

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Proceedings Volume 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 990529 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232392
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) provide high angular resolution with low effective area density as required for the Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics (Athena). The x-ray telescope consists of several hundreds of SPO mirror modules. During the development of the process steps of the SPO technology, specific requirements of a future mass production have been considered right from the beginning. The manufacturing methods heavily utilise off-the-shelf equipment from the semiconductor industry, robotic automation and parallel processing. This allows to upscale the present production flow in a cost effective way, to produce hundreds of mirror modules per year. Considering manufacturing predictions based on the current technology status, we present an analysis of the time and resources required for the Athena flight programme. This includes the full production process starting with Si wafers up to the integration of the mirror modules. We present the times required for the individual process steps and identify the equipment required to produce two mirror modules per day. A preliminary timeline for building and commissioning the required infrastructure, and for flight model production of about 1000 mirror modules, is presented.

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Eric Wille, Marcos Bavdaz, and Maximilien Collon "Mass production of silicon pore optics for ATHENA", Proc. SPIE 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 990529 (11 July 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232392

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