AXTAR: Mission Design Concept

Abstract

The Advanced X-ray Timing Array (AXTAR) is a mission concept for X-ray timing of compact objects that combines very large collecting area, broadband spectral coverage, high time resolution, highly flexible scheduling, and an ability to respond promptly to time-critical targets of opportunity. It is optimized for submillisecond timing of bright Galactic X-ray sources in order to study phenomena at the natural time scales of neutron star surfaces and black hole event horizons, thus probing the physics of ultradense matter, strongly curved spacetimes, and intense magnetic fields. AXTAR's main instrument, the Large Area Timing Array (LATA) is a collimated instrument with 2-50 keV coverage and over 3 square meters effective area. The LATA is made up of an array of supermodules that house 2-mm thick silicon pixel detectors. AXTAR will provide a significant improvement in effective area (a factor of 7 at 4 keV and a factor of 36 at 30 keV) over the RXTE PCA. AXTAR will also carry a sensitive Sky Monitor (SM) that acts as a trigger for pointed observations of X-ray transients in addition to providing high duty cycle monitoring of the X-ray sky. We review the science goals and technical concept for AXTAR and present results from a preliminary mission design study.

19 pages, 10 figures, to be published in Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, Proceedings of SPIE Volume 7732

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Measuring the neutron star equation of state using X-ray timing
• Thermonuclear burst oscillations
• Neutron star equation of state from the quark level in the light of GW170817
• Jets from Tidal Disruptions of Stars by Black Holes
• A Non-radial Oscillation Mode in an Accreting Millisecond Pulsar?
• LOFT: the Large Observatory For X-ray Timing
• Strange matter and strange stars in a thermodynamically self-consistent perturbation model with running coupling and running strange quark mass
• Post-Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff formalism for relativistic stars
• Orbital and epicyclic frequencies around neutron and strange stars in $R^2$ gravity