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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, May 23, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Peter Shirron

"A Look at the GSFC Technology that Enabled Astro-H/Hitomi"

ABSTRACT -- Astro-H, renamed Hitomi after its successful launch in February 2016, is the most sophisticated x-ray observatory ever to be put in orbit. Led by Japan’s space agency JAXA, it was a multinational project devoted to probing the dynamics of black holes, dark matter and large-scale structures in the Universe. Its four instruments are capable of detecting and imaging x-rays over a wide energy range, from 0.2 to 600 keV. By far the most sensitive of these is the Soft X-ray Spectrometer, which was built at GSFC. Its 36-pixel array is capable of measuring individual x-ray energies with a resolution of 4-5 eV across the 0.2-13 keV band. Critical to achieving this astounding sensitivity is cooling the array to very low temperature, 50 millikelvin. Coupled to a grazing-incidence x-ray telescope, also built at GSFC, the SXS is a powerful imaging spectrometer. This talk will explore the Goddard technology – detectors, magnetic refrigerator and mirrors – that made this instrument possible.

SPEAKER -- Peter Shirron earned his PhD in low temperature physics at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1989, after which he joined Goddard’s Cryogenics and Fluids Group. In the last 15 years, his focus has been on the development of adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADR), including systems that operate continuously. He led the development of the 3-stage ADR for the Soft X-Ray Spectrometer on Astro-H, and is now involved in design studies for future missions that require sub-kelvin cooling.


Next Week: Beginning of summer break. See you in September!
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov