The NIXT , or Normal Incidence X-ray Telescope , was a sounding rocket payload flown in the 1990s by Professor Leon Golub of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , to prototype normal-incidence (conventional) optical designs in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) solar imaging. In the EUV, the surface of the Sun appears dark, and hot structures in the solar corona appear bright; this allows study of the structure and dynamics of the solar corona near the surface of the Sun, which is not possible using visible light .
5-551: NIXT and its sister rocket, the MSSTA , were the prototypes for all normal-incidence EUV imaging instruments in use today, including SOHO/EIT , TRACE , and STEREO/SECCHI . In 1989, a NIXT sounding rocket launch detected soft X-Rays coming from a Solar flare . It was launched when the solar event was detected to allow high resolution imaging of the Sun's corona . Results from the observations were presented in 1990 in different papers. NIXT
10-554: A new technology or yield "first results" science. MSSTA is one of the last solar observing instruments to use photographic film rather than a digital camera system such as a CCD . MSSTA used film instead of a CCD in order to achieve the highest possible spatial resolution and to avoid the electronics difficulty presented by the large number of detectors that would have been required for its many telescopes. MSSTA and its sister rocket, NIXT , were prototypes for normal incidence EUV imaging telescopes that are in use today, as well as
15-420: The 1990s to test EUV/XUV imaging of the Sun using normal incidence EUV-reflective multilayer optics . MSSTA contained a large number of individual telescopes (> 10), all trained on the Sun and all sensitive to slightly different wavelengths of ultraviolet light. Like all sounding rockets, MSSTA flew for approximately 14 minutes per mission, about 5 minutes of which were in space—just enough time to test
20-719: The historic EIT instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft, and the TRACE spacecraft. MSSTA flew three times: once in 1991 (NASA Sounding Rocket flight 36.049), once in 1994 (flight 36.091), and once in 2002 (flight 36.194). While Dr. Walker's 1991 telescope was the first in the series to carry the MSSTA moniker, the precursor to the MSSTA, the Stanford/MSFC Rocket Spectroheliograph (NASA Sounding Rocket flight 27.092), which carried two EUV telescopes in 1987,
25-524: Was launched throughout the early 1990s and a paper summarizing the results from these mission was published in 1996. A successor program to NIXT, was the TXI (Tunable XUV Imager) sounding rocket program This astronomy -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . MSSTA The Multi-spectral solar telescope array , or MSSTA , was a sounding rocket payload built by Professor A.B.C. Walker, Jr. at Stanford University in
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