Wide Field Imager Overview

Welcome to the web page of the Wide Field Imager (WFI) for the Athena X-ray Observatory.

The WFI is one of the two scientific instruments proposed for Athena, the mission selected to address the “Hot and Energetic Universe” science theme identified by ESA (Athena@ESA) for its L2 large satellite mission with launch in the mid 2030s.

The WFI will provide imaging in the 0.2-15 keV energy band over a wide field, simultaneously with spectrally and time-resolved photon counting. The instrument is designed to make optimal use of the grasp (product of collecting area and solid angle) provided by the optical design of the ATHENA mirror system, by combining a sensitive approx. 40’x40' field of view DEPFET detector with a pixel size properly sampling the angular resolution of 5’’ on-axis (half energy width).

The WFI is a very powerful survey instrument, significantly surpassing currently existing capabilities. In addition, the WFI will provide unprecedented simultaneous high-time resolution and high count rate capabilities for the observation of bright sources with low pile-up and high efficiency.

The WFI instrument are currently in Phase B2, having gone through its System Requirements Review in March-May 2022.

The WFI consortium is led by the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (Germany) in collaboration with partners in Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, France, the United States, Switzerland, Portugal, and Greece.