Industrialization of the mirror plate coatings for the Athena mission

Abstract

In the frame of the development of the Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics (Athena) mission, currently in phase A, ESA is continuing to mature the optics technology and the associated mass production techniques. These efforts are driven by the programmatic and technical requirement of reaching TRL 6 prior to proposing the mission for formal adoption (planned for 2020). A critical part of the current phase A preparation activities is addressing the industrialization of the Silicon Pore Optics mirror plates coating. This include the transfer of the well-established coating processes and techniques, performed at DTU Space, to an industrial scale facility suitable for coating the more than 100,000 mirror plates required for Athena. In this paper, we explain the considerations for the planned coating facility including, requirement specification, equipment and supplier selection, preparing the coating facility for the deposition equipment, designing and fabrication.

Development of Athena mirror modules

“…Stacking robots for three different representative radii of ATHENA have been installed and have produced first stacks for inner, middle and outer radii, in a newly commissioned stacking facility. The stacking process development is ongoing for all three representative radii, together with a number of other activities that address the mirror modules integration in the mirror structure [38,39], ruggedisation [33], simulation [25] and the coating [36] of the optics.…”

Installation and commissioning of the silicon pore optics coating facility for the ATHENA mission

“…A plausible explanation for the thickness reduction is that the surface of the boron carbide oxidized when exposed to the atmosphere after deposition which is subsequently etched away in the SC-1 process 17 . This indicates that the surface oxidation is low for boron carbide films deposited in the ATHENA coating facility compared to boron carbide films deposited in the DTU Space coating facility inferring a higher compatibility of the boron carbide film deposited in the ATHENA coating facility with the chemical exposure processes 18 . With supporting data from the recently installed Low Energy X-ray Reflectometer we will obtain a deeper understanding of the film composition 19 .…”

“…With the foreseen mission launch date in 2031, an important milestone is approaching (official adoption of the mission by ESA), for which a demonstration of the technology readiness level 6 is required 3 . In this effort, an establishment of an industrialized mirror plate coating facility dedicated for ATHENA is key 4 . One of the major challenges in the establishment of the ATHENA coating facility was to transfer the coating quality (e.g.…”

Silicon pore optics mirror module production and testing

“…The coating process itself is currently being developed by DTU Space [20][21][22] and is then applied and tested on the industrial coating machine described above. First results of single, bi-and multi-layers of Ir and B4C coated on silicon using the industrial coating machine show very good results, demonstrating that the research grade quality can be matched with the mass production systems being prepared for Athena.…”