Coldest Ever Space Instrument Set To Fly

[zavvy]

<b>Coldest Ever Space Instrument Set To Fly</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />The coldest instrument ever to fly in space is set to launch aboard a Japanese X-ray observatory called Astro-E2 on Wednesday. The instrument, which has suffered several previous setbacks, will study some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe.<br /><br />Astro-E2 will blast off at 0330 GMT on an M5 rocket from Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima, near Japan's southern tip. It will then travel in a circular orbit at an altitude of 560 kilometres, studying the X-rays. The bodies emitting these include black holes in the process of devouring hot gas, exploding stars, and clouds of gas heated to millions of degrees by other violent events.<br /><br />But it is not the mission's first attempt to lift off. The mission's instrumentation was originally proposed for launch on NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999. But budget problems prevented the instruments from being included in that mission. Then, Japan and the US tried to launch the instruments aboard a mission called Astro-E in 2000. But the first stage of its M5 rocket failed before the satellite could reach orbit.<br /><br />”It went into the drink and we were extraordinarily depressed,” says Richard Mushotzky, a team member at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US. But the team used the delays to improve the mission, which will now launch with twice its original ability to resolve X-ray energies. <br /><br />Triple-wrapped<br />It will do accomplish this using a different approach from the two main X-ray telescopes already in space, Chandra and Europe's XMM-Newton. These study incoming X-ray light by effectively splitting it through a prism. Astro-E2 will instead measure how much a detector's temperature changes every time a photon hits it.<br /><br />This sensitive task requires Astro-E2’s main instrument, the X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS), to