MIT space cameras take first pictures (Forwarded)

News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

CONTACT:
Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402

October 14, 2005

MIT space cameras take first pictures
By Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office

X-ray cameras designed by MIT astrophysicists are a key component of a new
instrument aboard an orbiting Japanese observatory that will probe the
secrets of such phenomena as exploding stars.

Recently MIT's team was overjoyed -- and relieved -- when the instrument,
the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS), took its first pictures, flawlessly
capturing the image of an exploded star in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Only a few weeks earlier, one of the other two instruments on the
observatory, known as Suzaku, had failed.

For a little while Mark Bautz, leader of the MIT team, also feared the
worst for XIS. He and colleagues had returned home from Japan, where they
had activated their instrument, but were awaiting the final step -- the
opening of the Japanese-built protective covers -- before the cameras
could start taking images of the sky.

At 2 a.m. one August morning, Bautz waited in Boston for news of whether
that step was successful. "I was trading instant messaging with my
Japanese colleagues right up until the commands were sent [to open the
covers], and then all of a sudden they stopped responding," said the
principal research scientist at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and
Space Research. "I knew we had only a five-minute window, so it wasn't
long before I was convinced it hadn't worked."

Half an hour later, the good news finally appeared on his screen. "Turns
out they were so excited the instrument worked that they forgot to let me
know," said Bautz.

Although humans may revel in the bright hues of a rainbow or the flash of
a colorful bird, we are blind to a host of other phenomena because they
radiate light, like X-rays, that our eyes can't detect. "It turns out that
almost everything you see in the sky emits X-rays as well, so you can
learn a lot about an object by taking X-ray images," Bautz said.

Enter Suzaku, the latest observatory to explore the X-ray sky. MIT has
also been involved in past X-ray expeditions including the High-Energy
Transient Explorer (HETE-2), the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the
Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA).

The XIS aboard Suzaku is composed of the four cameras developed by MIT
plus four telescopes developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that
focus the sky onto the cameras. The cameras send the images back to Earth.

The researchers hope to learn more about such phenomena as supernovas
(exploding stars) and clusters of galaxies so massive that they trap
clouds of hot gas that emit X-rays.

In conjunction with another instrument aboard Suzaku, the XIS will also
help scientists study the emission processes near black holes. "There's a
nice synergy there because our instrument covers X-rays at very low
energies, while the other instrument goes to very high energies. Together
they'll help us put together the entire X-ray spectrum coming from matter
just outside a black hole," Bautz said.

In addition to MIT and NASA, other institutions involved in XIS are the
Institute of Space and Astronomical Sciences of the Japanese Aerospace
Exploration Agency, Osaka University and Kyoto University.

Bautz's MIT colleagues on the XIS team are Ed Boughan, Rick Foster, Steve
Kissel, Beverly LaMarr, Eric Miller, Gregory Prigozhin, George Ricker,
Matthew Smith, James O'Connor and Michael Doucette, all of the Kavli
Institute, and Jim Gregory, Barry Burke and Al Pillsbury of Lincoln Lab.

The Suzaku mission is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency and NASA.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 19, 2005
(download PDF at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/techtalk50-5.pdf).

RELATED WEBSITES

* X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS) on Suzaku
http://space.mit.edu/XIS/
* MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
http://space.mit.edu/

IMAGE CAPTIONS:

[Image 1:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/o...s-enlarged.jpg (32KB)]
The X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer observatory recently took these images of a
galaxy cluster (one for each of four cameras and telescopes key to the
device). Image courtesy: Mark Bautz, MIT

[Image 2:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/b...l-enlarged.jpg (53KB)]
MIT research scientists Steve Kissel, left, and Mark Bautz hold up a copy
of the core element used in their X-ray camera. Photo: Donna Coveney