What looks like a light sabre is actually a laser beam guided in its path through a hair-thin jet of water, in the same manner as conventional fibre optics.

This water jet provides a large ‘processing depth’, allowing parallel cutting of larger samples. Its water also serves to continually cool the cutting zone and efficiently remove cut material.

This Laser Microjet machine from Synova SA in Switzerland is being employed by cosine in the Netherlands to slice novel X-ray optics for ESA’s NewAthena space observatory to survey the hot, energetic Universe.

Energetic X-rays don’t behave like typical light waves: they don’t reflect in a standard mirror. Instead they can only be reflected at shallow angles, like stones skimming along water. So multiple mirrors must be stacked together to focus them. NewAthena will therefore employ ‘silicon pore optics’, based on the precisely-aligned stacking together of tens of thousands of mirror plates made from industrial silicon wafers, which are normally used to manufacture silicon chips.

This technology – developed by ESA, cosine and other partners – will enable the building of a 2.6 m diameter X-ray lens for NewAthena’s telescope. Production of these mirror modules has reached the demonstration stage and their mass production is now being prepared, to ready NewAthena for launch in 2037 as one of ESA’s major ‘Large class’ missions.