eROSITA - surveying the X-ray sky

X-rays trace some of the most extreme environments in the Universe, such as the plasmas close to black holes or the hot baryons in Galaxy clusters. These regions constitute a significant fraction of the total mass in the universe. Despite of the importance of these regions as
tracers for the evolution of structure in the universe, there is still no survey of the full sky in the X-ray band at energies above 2keV.

This situation will change later this year with the launch of the German eROSITA instrument on the Russian Spectrum-X-Gamma satellite. After launch and flight to L2, for the following four years eROSITA will be performing a survey of the whole X-ray sky between 0.5 and 10 keV. The mission is predicted to discover 2 Million new supermassive black holes in Active Galactic Nuclei, 100000 galaxy clusters, about 1 million X-ray active stars, and a large number of new neutron stars and black holes in our Galaxy. In the talk I will introduce the scientific aims of the mission and present the mission design and related hardware.