eROSITA

eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) will be the primary instrument on-board the Russian "Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma" (SRG) satellite which will be launched from Baikonur in 2012 and placed in an L2 orbit. The mission eROSITA should perform the first imaging all-sky survey in the medium energy X-ray range up to 10 keV with an unprecedented spectral and angular resolution. The nature of the mysterious Dark Energy that is driving the Universe apart is one of the most exciting questions facing astronomy and physics today. The surveys performed with eROSITA will provide information on the rate of expansion of the Universe, the fraction of mass in visible matter and the amplitude of primordial fluctuations that are the origin of clusters of galaxies and the whole structure of the universe.

The main scientific goals of the mission are

• to detect systematically all obscured accreting Black Holes in nearby galaxies and many (> 170000) new, distant active galactic nuclei
• to detect the hot intergalactic medium of 50-100 thousand galaxy clusters and groups and hot gas in filaments between clusters to map out the large scale structure in the Universe for the study of cosmic structure evolution
• to study in detail the physics of galactic X-ray source populations, like pre-main sequence stars supernova remnants and X-ray binaries

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