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Given the unprecedented effective area, the new ATHENA Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) focusing technology, the dynamic and variable L2 environment, where no X-ray mission has flown up to date, a dedicated Geant4 simulation campaign is needed to evaluate the impact of low energy protons scattering on the ATHENA mirror surface and the induced residual background level on its X-ray detectors. The Geant4 mass model is built as part of the ESA AREMBES project activities using the BoGEMMS framework. An SPO mirror module row is the atomic unit of the mass model, allowing the simulation of the full structure by means of 20 independent runs, one for each row. Thanks to the BoGEMMS configuration files, both single pores, mirror modules or the entire SPO row can be built with the same Geant4 geometry. Both Remizovich, in its elastic approximation, and Coulomb single scattering Geant4 models are used in the interaction of mono-energetic proton beams with a single SPO pore. The scattering efficiency for the first model is almost twice the efficiency obtained with the latter but for both cases we obtain similar polar and azimuthal angular distributions, with about 70-75% of scatterings generated by single or double reflections. The soft proton flux modelled for the plasma sheet region is used as input for the simulation of soft proton funnelling by the full SPO mass model. A much weaker soft proton vignetting than the one observed by XMM-Newton EPIC detectors is generated by ATHENA mirrors. The residual soft proton flux reaching the focal plane, defined as a 15 cm radius, is 10^4 times lower than the input L2 soft proton population entering the mirror, at the same energy, with rates comparable or higher than the ones observed in XMM EPIC-pn most intense soft proton flares.
Low energy protons (< 300 keV) can enter the field of view of X-ray space telescopes, scatter at small incident angles, and deposit energy on the detector, causing intense background flares at the focal plane or in the most extreme cases, damaging th
One of the science goals of the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on ESAs Athena X-ray observatory is to map hot gas structures in the universe, such as clusters and groups of galaxies and the intergalactic medium. These deep observations of faint diffuse sour
In-orbit experience has shown that soft protons are funneled more efficiently through focusing Wolter-type optics of X-ray observatories than simulations predicted. These protons can degrade the performance of solid-state X-ray detectors and contribu
Future large X-ray observatories like ATHENA will be equipped with very large optics, obtained by assembling modular optical elements, named X-ray Optical Units (XOU) based on the technology of either Silicon Pore Optics or Slumped Glass Optics. In b
Both the interplanetary space and the Earth magnetosphere are populated by low energy ($leq300$ keV) protons that are potentially able to scatter on the reflecting surface of Wolter-I optics of X-ray focusing telescopes and reach the focal plane. Thi