X-Ray/Gamma Ray Detectors
SXT
The Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) emerged from a very perceptive and constructive collaborative agreement between Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) and the USA National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to cooperate on an ISAS mission to study high-energy processes in the sun's atmosphere. The SXT itself was conceived and built by the National Observatory of Japan and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. The scientific planning for SXT, and its operation, has involved scientific groups in Japan and the USA. A very strong SXT team priority lay with the early implementation of a comprehensive software system for data handling and analysis. This subsequently evolved into the familiar and powerful SolarSoft system now in use by many solar groups for a large variety of experiments. The Yohkoh launch (August, 1991) gave us the first solar soft X-ray telescope equipped with a CCD camera: SXT. Although SXT's angular resolution is comparable to the Skylab telescopes, its performance is quite uniform over the entire sun, it has much lower scattered light, much more telemetry, and most importantly, the CCD itself. Such a detector is inherently linear and stable, and (much to our pleasure) robust; it is still going strong ten years later. Almost each day its images bring new thrills, especially since Yohkoh has survived into its second solar maximum. With time we've learned much better how to observe flares and CMEs with a soft X-ray telescope. Additional information available at "http://soi.stanford.edu/results/SolPhys200/Hudson/introduction.html" [Summary provided by Stanford University]