Calibration of the Solar-B x-ray optics

The Solar-B X-ray telescope (XRT) is a grazing-incidence modified Wolter I X-ray telescope, of 35 cm inner diameter and 2.7 m focal length. XRT, designed for full sun imaging over the wavelength 6-60 Angstroms, will be the highest resolution solar X-Ray telescope ever flown. Images will be recorded by a 2048 X 2048 back-illuminated CCD with 13.5 µm pixels (1 arc-sec/pixel ) with full sun field of view. XRT will have a wide temperature sensitivity in order to observe and discriminate both the high (5-10 MK) and low temperature (1-5 MK) phenomena in the coronal plasma. This paper presents preliminary results of the XRT mirror calibration performed at the X-ray Calibration Facility, NASA-MSFC, Huntsville, Alabama during January and February 2005. We discuss the methods and the most significant results of the XRT mirror performance, namely: characteristics of the point response function (PSF), the encircled energy and the effective area. The mirror FWHM is 0.8” when corrected for 1-g, finite source distance, and CCD pixelization. With the above corrections the encircled energy at 27m and 1keV is 52%. The effective area is greater than 2cm2 at 0.5keV and greater than 1.7cm2 at 1.0keV