FOXSI Sounding Rocket

A photograph of the FOXSI team in front of the FOXSI-2 sounding rocket on the launch pad.

The Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager, or FOXSI, is a sounding rocket payload built by UC Berkeley and led by Säm Krucker to test high energy grazing-incidence focusing optics paired with solid-state pixelated detectors to observe the Sun. FOXSI is composed of seven identical telescope modules and used Silicon and Cadmium Telluride strip detectors originally developed for the HXT telescope on the Japanese Astro-H mission. The FOXSI payload flew two times most recently in 2014.[1][2] Its first flight was in 2012. Like most sounding rockets, FOXSI flew for approximately 15 minutes per mission, and observed the Sun for about 5 minutes while in space. During its first flight, FOXSI successfully imaged a solar microflare in the hard x-ray band for the first time.[3]

A high resolution render of the FOXSI-2 payload.

References

  1. ↑ Fox, Karen (November 1, 2015). "NASA-funded FOXSI to Observe X-Rays From Sun". https://www.nasa.gov/. NASA. Retrieved July 28, 2015. External link in |website= (help)
  2. ↑ Fox, Karen (July 27, 2015). "A Next-Generation X-Ray Telescope Launches". https://www.nasa.gov/. NASA. Retrieved July 27, 2015. External link in |website= (help)
  3. ↑ Krucker, S.; Christe, S.; Glesener, L.; Ishikawa, S.; Ramsey, B.; Takahashi, T.; Watanabe, S.; Saito, S.; Gubarev, M. (2014). "First Images from the Focusing Optics X-Ray Solar Imager". The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 793: L32. Bibcode:2014ApJ...793L..32K. doi:10.1088/2041-8205/793/2/L32.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/9/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.