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On the Design of Wide-Field X-ray Telescopes

Abstract

X-ray telescopes having a relatively wide field-of-view and spatial resolution vs. polar off-axis angle curves much flatter than the parabolic dependence characteristic of Wolter I designs are of great interest for surveys of the X-ray sky and potentially for study of the Sun s X-ray emission. We discuss the various considerations affecting the design of such telescopes, including the possible use of polynomial mirror surface prescriptions, a method of optimizing the polynomial coefficients, scaling laws for mirror segment length vs. intersection radius, the loss of on-axis spatial resolution, and the positioning of focal plane detectors

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