D. Nguyen, T. Gaetz, D. Jerius, and I. Stern
SAO
As part of our efforts to support the AXAF program, the SAO AXAF Mission Support Team has developed a software suite to simulate AXAF images generated by the flight mirror assembly. One of the tasks of this system is to simulate the physical obstructions in front of and behind the AXAF mirrors. The generalized aperture program is designed to simulate the effects on the incident photon stream of physical obstructions, such as thermal baffles and pre- and postcollimators. It can handle a wide variety of aperture shapes, and has provisions to allow alterations of the photons by the apertures. The philosophy behind the aperture program is that a geometrically complicated aperture may be modeled by a combination of geometrically simpler apertures. This is done by incorporating a language, lua, to lay out the apertures. User provided callback functions enable the modeling of the interactions of the incident photon with the apertures. This approach allows for maximum flexibility since the geometry and interactions of obstructions can be specified by the user at run time.