Susan Hendrix
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-7745)

August 31, 2005

Goddard-Built Telescopes Aboard Suzaku Spacecraft Send Back 'First
Light' Images

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Suzaku mission has seen
remarkable first light images thanks to four X-Ray Telescopes (XRTs)
built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md. The
XRTs focus incoming x-rays onto the four X-Ray Spectrometer instruments
onboard Suzaku, formerly known as Astro-E2.

The four X-ray telescopes, together with a set of four cameras,
performed flawlessly, capturing the image of an exploded star in the
Small Magellanic Cloud. Supernovae are the cosmic factories of the most
important elements in the Universe, and supernova remnants provide the
crucial information on how they get disseminated in space. They are also
spectacular objects and the ideal targets to "show off" the capabilities
of the detectors.

"I'm extremely pleased to see how the four telescopes performed," said
team lead Dr. Peter Serlemitsos of the X-Ray Astrophysics Branch at
GSFC. "Obviously it will take more time to study their performance in
detail, but the first light images confirmed our expectations based on
ground calibration."

The four XRTs are made with foils coated with about two pounds of gold
with a thickness of only 2,000 angstroms, which is about 1/200 to 1/600
the thickness of a human hair. X-rays bounce off the gold and are
reflected toward the telescope detectors.

The four Charge-Coupled Devices detectors that capture the X-rays
bounced by the telescopes are similar to those onboard other missions,
such as Chandra and XMM-Newton, although these are new and have not yet
been subjected to the rigors of space. The new instruments will allow
scientists to study spectra and images of extended and faint sources
like supernova remnants or cluster of galaxies.

It has been a bittersweet few weeks for the Suzaku team because another
instrument on board, a high spectral resolution calorimeter built at
GSFC, stopped functioning due to a problem with the cryogenics. The
incident is still under investigation.

Despite this setback, the rest of the Suzaku mission is proceeding on
schedule with first light from the third set of detectors on board --
two hard X-ray detectors capable of capturing the very high-energy
photons – expected shortly.

The Suzaku mission is a collaborative effort between the JAXA and NASA.

For more information, go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/astro-e2
http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/