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Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics (NewAthena)
Telescope Details
Location
NewAthena will be launched into the first Lagrange point (L1) orbit of the Sun-Earth system, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. At L1, the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth balance each other out.
Purpose
Originally named Athena and renamed after a redesign in 2023, NewAthena will be an X-ray observatory. Astronomical X-rays are emitted by high-temperature matter and thus can be used to map high-energy astrophysical phenomena. NewAthena’s primary goals include mapping hot gas structures to determine their physical properties and searching for supermassive black holes. The observatory is designed to help answer two fundamental questions in astrophysics: How does ordinary matter assemble into the large-scale structures that we see in the universe? And how do black holes grow, behave and shape their galaxies and the universe?
NIST’s role
The NewAthena X-ray observatory will be a single X-ray telescope with two cameras, the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) and the Wide-Field Imager. NIST is contributing to the X-IFU, which is an imaging spectrometer with about 1,500 sensors that resolve different “colors” — or energies — of X-rays. An X-ray’s energy encodes information about its source, including its elemental composition and its velocity.
The sensors, contributed by NASA, are transition-edge-sensor (TES) microcalorimeters that measure the tiny amount of heat deposited when an X-ray is absorbed. NIST is contributing circuitry to read out the tiny pulses of electric current that are created when pixels in the TES array absorb an X-ray. NIST’s readout circuitry consists of superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) configured to be highly sensitive electric current meters, or ammeters.
Current status
The telescope is scheduled to be launched around 2037.
Other interesting facts
NewAthena is named after the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom.
Collaborators
The European Space Agency leads the project with important contributions from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The U.S. role in the X-IFU is the result of a long-standing collaboration between NASA and NIST. The X-IFU team specifically involves 11 countries and 276 members.
Media
