The optics system of the New Hard X-ray Mission: design and development

The New Hard X-ray Mission (NHXM) project will be operated by 2016 and is currently undergoing the Phase B study. It is based on 4 hard X-ray optics modules, each formed by 60 evenly spaced multilayer coated Wolter I mirror shells. An extensible bench is used to reach the 10 m focal length. The Wolter I monolithic substrates with multilayer coating are produced in NiCo by electroforming replication. Three of the mirror modules will host in the focal plane a hybrid a detector system (a soft X-ray Si DEPFET array plus a high energy CdTe detector). The detector of the fourth telescope will be a photoelectric polarimeter with imaging capabilities, operating from 2 up to 35 keV. The total on axis effective area of the three telescopes at 1 keV and 30 kev is of 1500 cm(2) and 350 cm(2) respectively, with an angular resolution of 20 arcsec HEW at 30 keV. In this paper we report on the design and development of the multilayer optics of the mission, based on thin replicated Ni mirror shells.