Facility for Alignment, Assembly, and Integration of the SPO Mirror Modules onto the ATHENA Telescope

Several hundreds of Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) mirror modules will be integrated and co-aligned onto the ATHENA (Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics) Mirror Assembly Module (MAM). The selected integration process, developed by Media Lario, exploits a full size optical bench to capture the focal plane image of each mirror module when illuminated by an UV plane wavefront at 218 nm. Each mirror module, handled by a manipulator, focuses the collimated beam onto a CCD camera placed at the 12 m focal position of the ATHENA telescope. The image is processed in real time to calculate the centroid position and overlap it to the centroid of the already integrated Mirror modules. Media Lario has designed the ATHENA Assembly Integration and Testing facility to realize the integration process for the flight telescope and has started its construction. The facility consists of a vertical optical bench installed inside a tower with controlled cleanroom conditions. The MAM axis is aligned along gravity and supported on actuators to compensate for gravity deformations. A robot device above the MAM is used for aligning the SPO Mirror modules. The 2.6 m paraboloid mirror that collects the light emitted by a UV source is in final polishing. The alignment system, the cell support and the metrology system for the UV collimator have been qualified and accepted for installation. Details about the optical bench and the status of the facility construction will be presented.