SH43B-2458
The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS)

Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Patrick R. Champey1, Amy R Winebarger2, Ken Kobayashi2, Sabrina L Savage2, Jonathan W Cirtain2, Peter Cheimets3, Edward Hertz3, Leon Golub4, Brian Ramsey2, Jeff McCracken2, Ralf Heilmann5, Mark Schattenburg5 and Alexander Bruccoleri6, (1)University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, United States, (2)NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, United States, (3)SAO, Cambridge, MA, United States, (4)Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Observatory, Cambridge, MA, United States, (5)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, (6)Izentis LLC, Cambridge, MA, United States
Abstract:
The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) is a NASA sounding
rocket instrument designed to observe soft X-ray emissions at 0.5 - 2.0 keV energies in the
solar atmosphere. The primary science goal is to di fferentiate steady, low-frequency heating
events from sporadic, high-frequency heating events in the active region core For the rst
time, high-temperature, low-emission plasma will be observed directly with 5 arcsec spatial
and 22 mÅ spectral resolution. The novel optical design consists of a Wolter I telescope and
a 3-optic grazing-incidence spectrograph. The X-ray spectrograph utilizes a nite conjugate
mirror pair and a planar, nanoprinted-silicon varied line space grating, which is being devel-
oped by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The telescope and spectrograph
mirrors will be nickel replicated and coated with iridium. Mandrel fabrication and nickel
replication will be done at MSFC as part of its replicated X-ray optics program. Mounting,
alignment, and integration of the ight optics will be performed at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics (SAO). The MaGIXS science camera is being developed at MSFC
and is based on CLASP heritage, which obtained read noise performance of 5.5 e􀀀- RMS. The
camera will include a e2v Technologies 2kx2k frame transfer CCD with 4-channel readout
(500 kpixel/s/channel). We will present an overview of the MaGIXS optical system and
fabrication of the telescope and spectrograph mirrors.
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