Shiny: a Look at Astro-H Flight Hardware

• By Maggie Masetti
• January 9, 2013
• Comments Off on Shiny: a Look at Astro-H Flight Hardware

Here’s some brand new photos from one of the missions we are working on here at the Astrophysics Science Division – Astro-H! Astro-H is an orbiting X-ray astronomy observatory being developed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). NASA and JAXA have teamed up to develop a high resolution “Soft X-Ray Spectrometer” (SXS) for the mission.

The SXS uses a state-of-the-art X-ray calorimeter spectrometer at the focus of an X-ray telescope. The calorimeter is a low-temperature sensor that measures the energy of each X-ray photon as heat and is extraordinarily precise. NASA Goddard has the lead responsibility for the SXS detector system.

We at Goddard are also providing two telescopes, one for the SXS and one for another instrument, the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI).

Pictured here is one completed X-ray telescope for ASTRO-H plus one quadrant of a telescope. The black part on top of the X-ray telescope is the precollimator. The precollimator helps eliminate the glare from bright X-ray sources from outside the nominal viewing direction. It will be made in Japan but these visiting colleagues actually brought a test version to make sure it fits properly with the Goddard-made parts.

Credit: Kenji Hamaguchi

Takashi Okajima (left) and Pete Serlemitsos(right) with visiting Japanese colleagues in the middle. They are pictured with the finished flight hardware.

Credit: Kenji Hamaguchi

(Astro-H will also have hard X-ray telescopes, similar to the ones on NuSTAR – those are entirely made in Japan.)

If you’d like to learn more about how X-ray telescopes work, check out our website for NASA/Japanese X-ray astronomy collaborations, particular the technology section. Also, Suzaku (the previous generation collaborative observatory) carried a similar instrument to the SXS and similar detectors.