Calibration of the AXAF observatory: overview

The Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) will soon begin its exploration of the x-ray universe, providing unprecedented angular and spectral resolution. Also unprecedented is the ambitious goal of calibrating the AXAF observatory to an accuracy of a few percent. Toward this end, AXAF science and engineering teams undertook an extensive calibration program at component, subsystem, and system levels. This paper is an overview of the system-level calibration activities, conducted over the past year at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) X-Ray Calibration Facility (XRCF).