The 122-megapixel pictures taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, are making progress in astronomy. Really cool stuff. But the space agency’s newest sky-peeper does something different: it uses 36 pixels to do groundbreaking science in space. There really are 36 pixels, not 36 megapixels.
A project called XRISM, which stands for “crism,” is a partnership between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It was launched into space last September and has been searching the universe ever since for answers to some of science’s hardest problems. Resolve, the mission’s imaging tool, has a 36-pixel image camera.
The Resolve is more than just a camera. “Every X-ray that hits its detector gives us information about its temperature,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard, in a news release. “Resolve is a microcalorimeter spectrometer because each of its 36 pixels measures a very small amount of heat from each incoming X-ray. This lets us see the chemical fingerprints of the elements that make up the sources with a level of detail that has never been seen before.”
With its wide range of pixels, the Resolve device can pick up “soft” X-rays, which have energies about 5,000 times higher than wavelengths of visible light. Its main goal is to study the hottest parts of space, the biggest structures, and the heaviest things in space, like supermassive black holes. Even though Resolve only has a few pixels, each one is very powerful; it can produce a wide range of visible data with an energy range of 400 to 12,000 electron volts.
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The agency says the tool can pick up on the movements of things inside a target, giving a three-dimensional view. Gas moving toward us gives off a little more energy than usual, while gas moving away gives off a little less energy than usual. This feature opens up new ways for scientists to study the world. For example, it helps scientists figure out how hot gas moves through galaxy clusters and keep a close eye on how different elements move in the remains of supernova blasts.
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