IXO spacecraft design

Proposed design for the International X-ray Observatory (IXO), a joint ESA-NASA-JAXA candidate mission being considered for launch around 2020. The partner space agencies have agreed that the new mission will have a 20-fold increase in collecting area compared to the current XMM-Newton while also having a threefold increase in resolution. To achieve this within the mission’s stringent mass restrictions requires new techniques to achieve stiff but lightweight mirrors. The two technologies under investigation are NASA’s ‘slumped glass’ technique and ESA’s ‘silicon pore optics’.