Shillong, July 18: JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) is leading a new space mission called XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission), which aims to investigate high-energy light, akin to an X-ray rainbow.
The satellite, XRISM, is set to launch from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center on August 25. Its instrument, Resolve, will be responsible for probing the high-energy light.
Resolve’s mission is to offer insights into some of the universe’s most energetic phenomena, such as black holes, galaxy clusters, and the aftermath of stellar explosions. The data collected by Resolve will provide valuable information about their behavior and composition.
As per IANS, Resolve is a collaboration between NASA and JAXA, featuring an X-ray microcalorimeter spectrometer instrument. When an X-ray strikes its 6-by-6-pixel detector, Resolve measures the tiny temperature changes produced. To accurately determine the X-ray’s energy, the detector must be cooled down to approximately minus 270 Celsius, just a fraction above absolute zero. This cooling process takes place inside a container of liquid helium that is about the size of a refrigerator.
By gathering thousands or even millions of X-rays from a cosmic source, Resolve can obtain high-resolution spectra of the object. Spectra are measurements of light’s intensity across a range of energies, similar to how prisms spread visible light into different colors of the rainbow.
In the past, prisms were used in early spectrometers to observe spectral lines, which indicate the absorption or emission of energy by atoms or molecules. Nowadays, astronomers use spectrometers tuned to various types of light to study the physical states, motions, and compositions of cosmic objects.
Resolve will perform spectroscopy for X-rays with energies ranging from 400 to 12,000 electron volts, creating a spectrum by measuring the energies of individual X-rays. (In comparison, visible light energies range from about 2 to 3 electron volts.)
Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard, said, “The spectra XRISM collects will be the most detailed we’ve ever seen for some of the phenomena we’ll observe.” This promises to be a significant advancement in our understanding of the universe’s high-energy events.