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Thanks very much for reading, and thanks for your questions!

1) For X-ray and gamma-ray instruments, we are generally looking to improve the resolution in each of these areas: energy resolution, angular/spatial resolution, and time resolution---more information in any of these aspects will help us get a more complete picture of the astrophysical sources we're planning to look at. For example, using these remarkable TES sensors, with their amazing energy resolution, to look at X-rays will help us be able to better understand what's going on inside a supernova (this paper of ours describes it a bit more, if one is interested! https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01525).

2) For this particular mission (DR-TES), we do not use any optics or pointing. However, another mission (XL-Calibur: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09761; https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10608) of ours indeed does use grazing incidence mirrors and a pointing system. The pointing system for that mission is done with the excellent Wallops Arc-Second Pointer (https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2017-3609) from NASA!

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