Design and development of the multilayer optics for the new hard x-ray mission

The New Hard X-ray Mission (NHXM) project will be operated by 2017 and is currently undergoing a Phase B study, under the coordination of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The project is being proposed by an international team in the context of the ESA Call CV M3 as a Small Mission program, with a large Italian participation. 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 coated X-ray mirrors based on NiCo shells.