Space Station Gets X-Ray Eyes

July 28, 2009 -- A new telescope to scan for transient X-ray sources was installed on the International Space Station last week, giving astronomers a new tool for finding flaring suns, black holes and exploding stars.

The Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, or MAXI, will scan the sky once every 96 minutes as the space station orbits Earth.

The data will be transmitted via satellite networks live and distributed through the Internet by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which designed and owns the telescope.

"This is a nice idea that they have," astronomer Neil Gehrels with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"There are a lot of things in the sky that turn on and off between minutes and hours and sometimes days. This MAXI instrument will be more sensitive to detect fainter ones of those than anything that has flown before. It's really the next step forward."

Gehrels, who is the principal investigator of the gamma ray-hunting Swift telescope, says MAXI complements the existing suite of high-energy orbital observatories.

"They'll provide the X-ray data that we don't have," Gehrels said.

The telescope's design makes it particularly suited for studying small black holes in the local Milky Way galaxy, as well as the highly variable massive black holes at the center of quasars. Supernovas, which are the exploded remains of dying stars, also emit X-rays, as do stars with highly active magnetic fields on their surfaces.

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Gehrels said it's even possible that the comet crashing in Jupiter last week could have generated X-rays.

X-rays and gamma rays are blocked by Earth's atmosphere so telescopes need to be in space to directly detect this type of radiation, which is emitted from very hot, high-energy objects.

JAXA will operate a ground station for the telescope at its Tsukuba Space Center outside of Tokyo. It will monitor data relayed from MAXI up to 17 hours a day while the station is in satellite communications range.

When a transient signal or other significant X-ray source is found, the ground station will issue an alert notice to observers worldwide within 30 seconds after the incident. In addition, live data from the telescope will be available four to five hours a day through the Internet, depending on satellite availability and operations aboard the station, JAXA says.

Scientists are expected to begin calibrating MAXI's instruments in August, with observations scheduled to begin in November, said Naoko Matsuo, a JAXA spokeswoman at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The instrument, one of the first two science experiments installed on the outdoor porch of Japan's Kibo module, is expected to operate for two years, added NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean.

The station also has a solar telescope that is operated by the European Space Agency. MAXI is its first X-ray astronomy instrument.

Related Links:

Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, or MAXI

HowStuffWorks.com: Spacewalks

Discovery Space