The Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager (SSAXI-Rocket) is a ride-along instrument to the High-Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) Flare NASA sounding rocket launch campaign scheduled for the Spring 2024. In the short 5- minute rocket flight, SSAXI-Rocket will measure the soft X-ray near-peak emission phase of a large solar flare of GOES C-class or greater. The SSAXI-Rocket instrument has peak sensitivity to 10 MK solar plasma, similar to the current Hi-C flare extreme ultraviolet instruments, providing the exploration of the variability in heating and energy transport of solar flares. SSAXI-Rocket combines small X-ray focusing optic (Wolter-I) with onaxis imaging resolution of 9 arcseconds or better and high-speed readout CMOS detector, to image the flare soft X-rays at 5 hertz or faster, with minimized image saturation and pixel signal blooming. These high-time cadence measurements can help uncover the soft X-ray intensity variations which can provide constraints on the intermittent heating processes in the flare magnetic loops. SSAXI-Rocket is the testbed for technology that is planned for future heliophysics and astronomy SmallSat, CubeSat, and large satellite X-ray observatories.
The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) is a sounding rocket mission that completed a successful flight from the White Sands Missile Range on July 30, 2021. MaGIXS captured spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra from portions of two solar active regions during its roughly 5-minute flight. The instrument was originally designed as a grazing incidence slit spectrograph but flew in a slit-less configuration that produced overlapping spectroheliograms. For the second flight, MaGIXS-2, the instrument has been reconfigured to a more simplified optical layout that reuses the Wolter-I telescope and blazed varied-line space reflective grating. The field stop at the telescope focal plane and the finite conjugate spectrometer mirror pair have been removed – the telescope now directly feeds the grating. Additionally, an identical but new 2k x 1k CCD camera has been built for this flight. The MaGIXS-2 data product will again be overlapping spectroheliograms of at least one solar active region, but with improved resolution, a larger field of view and increased effective area. Here we present the updated instrument layout, the expected performance, the integration and calibration approach, and proposed future improvements, including the implementation of additional complimentary spectral diagnostics.
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