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ESA Looks Further Back In Time

February 09, 1998

Europe's X- ray Multi Mirror (XMM) space telescope goes on show for the first time on Tuesday 10 February 1998. When it is launched in 1999 into an orbit 70,000 miles above the earth, XMM will search for cosmic x-rays from the intensely hot areas of our galaxy and beyond. Sources of these x-rays include black holes, the nucleii of quasars, vampire stars, white dwarfs and exploding stars.

While the Hubble Space Telescope is able to measure light from objects with temperatures of a few thousand degrees Kelvin, XMM will detect light from objects as hot as 10 million degrees Kelvin. The unique sensitivity of XMM will also allow it to probe far back in time, to explore the Universe when it was perhaps only one tenth of its present age, and before the birth of many of the galaxies we see today.

More than 10 metres tall, and weighing nearly four tonnes, Europe's largest scientific spacecraft ever now stands in the test bay at the European Space Agency's science and technology centre in the Netherlands. An engineering feat, the XMM satellite will carry three x-ray telescopes and one smaller optical telescope to help interpret the x-ray images. Each of the X-ray telescopes has 58 high precision mirrors to guide the x-rays to a common focus. This ensures that 60% of the x-rays entering the telescope will be captured - far exceeding the power of any x-ray telescope in the world.

British scientists have played a leading role in the European project. The universities of Leicester and Birmingham working closely with British industry have designed and developed two sensitive cameras which will record the x-rays images, while the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) in Surrey has helped build a spectrometer to measure the individual chemical elements and their temperature. MSSL also led the team which developed the optical/ultraviolet telescope.

The UK is also providing a Survey Science Centre at Leicester University, with support from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and Cambridge University, from where all the XMM data will be distributed to astronomers around the world.

Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)