NASA's New IXPE Mission Opens Its Eyes and Is Ready for Discovery! - SciTechDaily

By Molly Porter, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Having spent just over a month in space, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is working and already zeroing in on some of the hottest, most energetic objects in the universe.

A joint effort between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, IXPE is the first space observatory dedicated to studying the polarization of X-rays coming from objects like exploded stars and black holes.

“The start of IXPE’s science observations marks a new chapter for X-ray astronomy,” said Martin Weisskopf, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The IXPE team spent the next three weeks checking out the observatory’s maneuvering and pointing abilities and aligning the telescopes.

Over the course of these tests, the team pointed IXPE at two bright calibration targets: 1ES 1959+650, a black-hole-powered galaxy core with jets shooting into space; and SMC X-1, a spinning dead star, or pulsar.

The brightness of these two sources made it easy for the IXPE team to see where X-rays are falling on IXPE’s polarization-sensitive detectors and make small adjustments to the telescopes’ alignment.

IXPE transmits scientific data several times a day to a ground station operated by the Italian Space Agency in Malindi, Kenya.

The data flows from the Malindi station to IXPE’s Mission Operations Center at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and then to IXPE’s Science Operations Center at NASA Marshall for processing and analysis.

IXPE’s scientific data will be publicly available from the High Energy Astrophysics Science Research Center at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Marshall science operations team also coordinates with mission operations team at LASP to schedule science observations.

The science team has also reserved about a month to observe other interesting objects that may appear in the sky or brighten unexpectedly.

IXPE is a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries.

January 10, 2022

January 10, 2022