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About XRISM

The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) is a JAXA/NASA collaborative mission, with ESA participation, with the objective to investigate X-ray celestial objects in the Universe with high-throughput, high-resolution spectroscopy. XRISM is expected to launch in the Japanese fiscal year 2022 (TBR) on a JAXA H-IIA rocket.

XRISM Instruments

The XRISM payload consists of two instruments:

  • Resolve, a soft X-ray spectrometer, which combines a lightweight Soft X-ray Telescope paired with a X-ray Calorimeter Spectrometer, and provides non-dispersive 5-7 eV energy resolution in the 0.3-12 keV bandpass with a field of view of about 3 arcmin.
    • Hitomi SXS detector.
    Hitomi SXS Calorimeter insert with detector installed.
  • Xtend, a soft X-ray Imager, is a CCD detector with a larger field, at the focus of the second lightweights Soft X-ray Telescope in the energy range of 0.4-13 keV

Their characteristics are similar to the SXS and SXI, respectively flown on Hitomi. XRISM is designed to recover the science capability lost with the Hitomi incident, but focuses only on the soft X-ray bands.

X-ray Mirror Assembly (XMA)

Each instrument is combined with an identical X-ray Mirror Assembly (XMA), which houses the primary (parabolic nested foils) and secondary (hyperbolic nested foils) mirrors. Each mirror contains 4 quadrants with 203 nested mirror foil segments (1624 mirror segments in a single XMA).

XRISM team member Yang Soong, a researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, displays one of the 1,624 foil mirror segments used in an X-ray Mirror Assembly being built for the JAXA/NASA mission.
Credit: Taylor Mickal/NASA
One quadrant of a mirror.
Credit: Taylor Mickal/NASA
Fully assembled primary and secondary mirrors of the XMA.

XRISM at GSFC

NASA/GSFC develops the Resolve detector and many of its subsystems together with the Soft X-ray Telescopes. NASA/GSFC has also responsibility for the Science Data Center charter to delevelop the analysis software for all instruments, the data processing pipeline as well as to support Guest Observers and the XRISM Guest Observer Program.