The in-orbit imaging performance of the three X-ray telescopes on board of the X-ray astronomy observatory XMM-Newton is presented and compared with the performance measured on ground at the MPE PANTER test facility. The comparison shows an excellent agreement between the on ground and in-orbit performance.

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Wide Field X-ray Telescope (WFXT) is the core instrument of the Wide Angle X-ray Survey (WAXS) mission, which is aimed at conducting a high angular resolution, high sensitivity X-ray survey over a large solid angle of the sky. The project has been developed as a feasibility study in the frame of the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana ( ASI) program for small-medium satellite missions. WFXT uses grazing incidence optics based on a new design where the Wolter I profile is substituted by a five term polynomial profile. The coeffIcients of the polynomium are optimized to obtain high spatial resolution (< 15 arcsec half energy width) over a field of view (FOV) of about 1 degree. The WFXT optics consist of 25 nested shells. In order to have both a large effective area at low energies (%# 360 2 at 1.5 keY) and a meaningful area at higher energies ('.-' 85 cm2 at 4.5 keV), a design consisting of 9 large mirror shells and 16 smaller shells, contributing mainly at higher energies, has been developed. The outermost and innermost mirror shells have a diameter of 600 and 226 mm, respectively. The total length of the mirror shells is 120+120 mm, while the focal length of the optical system is 3000 mm. For the WFXT optics, in addition to the well proved manufacturing process by nickel electroforming, we considered a novel replication technique for the manufacture of the mirrors which make use of ceramic materials like Silicon Carbide (SiC) in order to meet the stringent requirements of high spatial resolution and low weight. In this paper we give the details of the optical design and report the results of the X-ray measurements of the prototypes of the outermost mirror shell manufactured with nickel and SiC.

The pn-CCD camera is developed as one ofthe focal plane instruments for the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) on board the X-ray Multi Mirror (XMM) mission to be launched in 1999. The detector consists of four quadrants of three pnCCDs each, which are integrated on one silicon wafer. Each CCD has 200 x 64 pixels (150 im x 150 tim) with 280 im depletion depth. One CCD of a quadrant is read out at a time, while the four quadrants can be processed independently of each other. In standard imaging mode the CCDs are read out sequentially every 70 ms. Observations of point sources brighter than 1 mCrab will be effected by photon pile-up. However, special operating modes can be used to observe bright sources up to 1 50 mCrab in Timing Mode with 30 ts time resolution and very bright sources up to several Crab in Burst Mode with 7 is time resolution. We have tested one quadrant of the EPIC pn-CCD camera at line energies from 0.52 keV to 17.4 keV at the long beam test facility Panter in the focus of the qualification mirror module for XMM. In order to test the time resolution of the system, a mechanical chopper was used to periodically modulate the beam intensity. Pulse periods down to 0.7 ms were generated. This paper describes the performance of the pn-CCD detector in Timing and Burst readout modes with special emphasis on energy and time resolution.