Abstract

An improved version of out rocket-borne x-ray telescope was flown on 22 Feb. 1991 and is presently scheduled to fly again on 11 July 1991, for studies of the Solar x-ray corona. The telescope consists of a large (25 cm. diameter) aspheric mirror, coated with a Co-C multilayer to provide x-ray reflectivity at 63.5 A. Data are recorded on Kodak Technical Pan film; up to 40 exposures, varying from 1 sec to 60 sec duration, are obtained during the five minutes of available Solar fine pointing. They improvements made to the telescope since 1989 include: 1) a new mirror and multilayer coating for improved reflectivity; b) rediesigned mirror mount to increase active area available; c) improved visible light-blocking filters with higher x-ray throughput. The overall increase in sensitivity is about a factor of three, and the spatial resolution obtained until now is of order one arcsecond. We will present results from the February flight and, if available from the July flight as well.

© 1991 Optical Society of America