Hard X-ray imaging mission NeXT Original Research Article

One of the major fields, which should be explored following Chandra and XMM-Newton is the hard X-ray sky up to several tens of keV with certain imaging capabilities. A new X-ray telescope mission or Non-thermal Energy eXploration Telescope (NeXT) in Japan is the first satellite mission proposed for a hard X-ray telescope using multilayer supermirror. The hybrid X-ray imager will be placed on the focal plane to observe hard X-ray images with CdTe pixel detector underneath a thin CCD for soft X-ray imaging. For high-resolution spectroscopy, TES type calorimeters are considered without cryogen. Non-imaging hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray detector is studied to achieve unprecedented sensitivity. NeXT will be a sort of pathfinder of hard X-ray astronomy not only technically but also scientifically.