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INTRODUCTION

 

The Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility ( AXAF ) constitutes the x-ray component of NASA's ``Great Observatories'' program, and will provide high-resolution imaging and high-resolution dispersive spectroscopy of astrophysical x-ray sources[1]. A precision calibration of the AXAF telescope and science instruments will be performed by the AXAF Team, using x-ray sources located at NASA's X-Ray Calibration Facility (XRCF) at Marshall Space Flight Center.

Some of these x-ray sources will involve electron-impact on over twenty different targets spanning a range of atomic number , including some compounds. A tool to predict the spectra of x-rays from these sources is necessary for the AXAF calibration planning to predict the detected spectra and count rates that will be observed from the various combined telescope and detector calibrations. In this paper we discuss the development of a model (§ 2) to simulate both the line and continuum spectra for x-ray energies arising from electron impact on solid targets. We compare our model results (§ 3) with that of Pella et al. [2] and with data of x-ray spectra from a Manson source at MIT[3].



Martin E. Sulkanen
Wed May 31 14:37:54 CDT 1995