The Potential of the Wide Field Camera on ROSAT for Investigations of the XUV Background

Abstract

The ROSAT X-ray astronomy satellite, due to be launched in early 1990, will carry two separate and complementary grazing-incidence telescopes with co-aligned axes. The German X-ray telescope (XRT) will cover the soft X-ray region in the range 0.15–2 keV (6–80 Å), while the U.K. XUV Wide Field Camera (WFC) will extend coverage to beyond 200 Å. The WFC is a joint project of Leicester and Birmingham Universities, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and the authors' institutes. The primary objective of ROSAT is to perform an all-sky survey over a period of six months. This will be followed by a guest-observer, “pointed” phase. We briefly discuss the sensitivity of the WFC to the soft X-ray/XUV background (SXRB) and the problems and techniques associated with distinguishing the astronomical background from other sources of background.