On 11th May 2007 the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester hosted a one day meeting to discuss the science potential of the LWFT mission.

The 'Lobster-Eye' Wide-Field X-ray Telescope (LWFT) is a novel telescope proposed for inclusion as a core payload element on the Russian-German space mission Spectrum-RG. The proposed instrument consists a set of 5 stand-alone modules each of which is a fully imaging X-ray telescope, based on micro-channel plate (MCP) X-ray optics and Micromegas detectors. The lightweight optics plus flexible "modular" design give LWFT a huge instantaneous grasp (collecting area * field-of-view solid angle). Relative to other instruments configured as All-Sky Monitors (ASM), such as the RXTE ASM and the Japanese MAXI instrument to be deployed on the ISS (Matsuoka et al, 1999), LWFT offers an order of magnitude improvement in both point-source sensitivity and angular resolution. Each LWFT module has a field of view of approximately 30° x 30° with a 5-module configuration giving instantaneous coverage of approximately 10% of the sky. When the satellite is in all-sky survey mode up to 80% of the accessible sky will be monitored once every satellite orbital period (of roughly 95 min) over a time-line extending up to 3 years (dependent on the final mission operations plan). LWFT provides a very impressive capability for studying time-variable phenomena and surveying the sky in the soft X-ray band.

The first part of the meeting comprised a series of presentations describing the Spectrum-RG mission and LWFT concept, instrumentation, capabilities and main science themes. There was then time for presentations on specific science topics. The presentations given at the meeting can be downloaded as PDF files from here,