The X-ray Telescope (XRT) of the Hinode mission provides an unprecedented combination of spatial and temporal resolution in solar coronal studies. The high sensitivity and broad dynamic range of XRT, coupled with the spacecraft’s onboard memory capacity and the planned downlink capability will permit a broad range of coronal studies over an\ud extended period of time, for targets ranging from quiet Sun to X-flares. This paper discusses in detail the design, calibration, and measured performance of the XRT instrument up to the focal plane. The CCD camera and data handling are discussed separately in a companion paper

The Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) aboard the Solar-B satellite (Hinode) is designed to perform high-precision photometric and polarimetric observations of the Sun in visible light spectra (388 -668 nm) with a spatial resolution of 0.2 -0.3 arcsec. The SOT consists of two optically separable components: the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA), consisting of a 50-cm aperture Gregorian with a collimating lens unit and an active tip-tilt mirror, and an accompanying Focal Plane Package (FPP), housing two filtergraphs and a spectro-polarimeter. The optomechanical and optothermal performance of the OTA is crucial to attain unprecedented high-quality solar observations. We describe in detail the instrument design and expected stable diffraction-limited on-orbit performance of the OTA, the largest state-of-the-art solar telescope yet flown in space.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), a next generation facility instrument on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, is a very wide-field, massively multiplexed, optical and near-infrared spectrograph. Exploiting the Subaru prime focus, 2394 reconfigurable fibers will be distributed over the 1.3 deg field of view. The spectrograph has been designed with 3 arms of blue, red, and near-infrared cameras to simultaneously observe spectra from 380nm to 1260nm in one exposure at a resolution of ∼1.6−2.7Å. An international collaboration is developing this instrument under the initiative of Kavli IPMU. The project is now going into the construction phase aiming at undertaking system integration in 2017-2018 and subsequently carrying out engineering operations in 2018-2019. This article gives an overview of the instrument, current project status and future paths forward.

No abstract