Abstract
The Water Recovery X-Ray Rocket (WRXR) was a suborbital rocket payload that was launched and recovered in April 2018. The WRXR flew two technologies being developed for future large x-ray missions: x-ray reflection gratings and a hybrid CMOS detector (HCD). The large-format replicated gratings on the WRXR were measured in ground calibrations to have absolute single-order diffraction efficiency of ∼60 % , ∼50 % , and ∼35 % at CVI, OVII, and OVIII emission energies, respectively. The HCD was operated with ∼6 e − read noise and ∼88 eV energy resolution at 0.5 keV. The WRXR was also part of a two-payload campaign that successfully demonstrated NASA sounding rocket water recovery technology for science payloads. The primary instrument, a soft x-ray grating spectrometer, targeted diffuse emission from the Vela supernova remnant over a field-of-view >10 deg2. The flight data show that the detector was operational during flight and detected x-ray events from an on-board calibration source, but there was no definitive detection of x-ray events from Vela. Flight results are presented along with a discussion of factors that could have contributed to the null detection.
Highlights
The Water Recovery X-Ray Rocket (WRXR) was a suborbital rocket payload that launched from the Kwajalein Atoll on April 4, 2018
The WRXR was a technology-driven astrophysics payload that sought to demonstrate the performance of two technologies assigned the highest priority to NASA Astrophysics technology development in the 2019 Astrophysics Biennial Technology Report:[1] x-ray reflection gratings and an x-ray hybrid CMOS detector (HCD)
The HCD used for the WRXR spectrometer was a specially modified, engineering-grade Teledyne HAWAII-2RG detector (H2RG), where the “2” refers to the size of the readout integrated circuit (ROIC) array in multiples of 1024 pixels, resulting in a 2048 × 2048 pixel array
Summary
The Water Recovery X-Ray Rocket (WRXR) was a suborbital rocket payload that launched from the Kwajalein Atoll on April 4, 2018. The WRXR was a technology-driven astrophysics payload that sought to demonstrate the performance of two technologies assigned the highest priority to NASA Astrophysics technology development in the 2019 Astrophysics Biennial Technology Report:[1] x-ray reflection gratings and an x-ray hybrid CMOS detector (HCD) Both technologies were studied or are actively under development for the Lynx flagship mission concept,[2,3,4] explorer and probe mission concepts,[5,6,7,8] and smaller missions, such as suborbital rocket payloads[9,10] and cubesats.[11] The WRXR, along with the Colorado Highresolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph,[12] enabled the first successful demonstrations of NASA water recovery technology for astrophysics suborbital rocket payloads. The spectrometer had a FoV of >10 deg[2] and resolving power of λ∕δλ ∼ 40 in Vela’s dominant emission lines: OVII, OVIII, and CVI
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