The First Flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-Ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS)

Abstract

The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) sounding rocket experiment launched on 2021 July 30 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. MaGIXS is a unique solar observing telescope developed to capture X-ray spectral images of coronal active regions in the 6–24 Å wavelength range. Its novel design takes advantage of recent technological advances related to fabricating and optimizing X-ray optical systems, as well as breakthroughs in inversion methodologies necessary to create spectrally pure maps from overlapping spectral images. MaGIXS is the first instrument of its kind to provide spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra across a wide field of view. The plasma diagnostics available in this spectral regime make this instrument a powerful tool for probing solar coronal heating. This paper presents details from the first MaGIXS flight, the captured observations, the data processing and inversion techniques, and the first science results.

KAPPA: A Package for the Synthesis of Optically Thin Spectra for the Non-Maxwellian κ-distributions. II. Major Update to Compatibility with CHIANTI Version 10

“…Similarly, emission lines from flaring plasma also show strong departures from Maxwellian (Dzifčáková et al 2018). Contrary to that, the quiet Sun or even bright point corona are Maxwellian (Lörinčík et al 2020;Del Zanna et al 2022;Savage et al 2023). In Del Zanna et al (2022), the quiet Sun was observed within the same dataset directly in the vicinity of the active region.…”

“…This is because for the κ-distributions, the tail is relatively strong (see Figure 1) compared for example to the distributions composed of a core Maxwellian and a power-law tail (Dzifčáková et al 2011), used to describe the electron distribution derived from X-ray bremsstrahlung in flares. Still, even with a relatively strong tail, the changes in intensity of most emission lines with κ-distributions are of the order of several tens of per cent, and rarely more than a factor of two compared to the Maxwellian (see, e.g., Dzifčáková & Kulinová 2010;Mackovjak et al 2013;Dudík et al 2015;Lörinčík et al 2020;Del Zanna et al 2022;Savage et al 2023). The reasons for this choice are chiefly twofold.…”

“…For some ions, the changes in the relative ion abundances occur at T > T max ; for others at all temperatures (for example, Fe XIV, see Figure 3), while for other ions, such as Fe XVII, the EIMI affects dominantly temperatures below T max . Therefore, the EIMI is also a potentially significant process affecting the X-ray spectra such as those observed by MaGIXS (Savage et al 2023), should the X-ray lines of Fe XVII-Fe XVIII be formed in non-Maxwellian conditions.…”

“…As an example of the synthetic spectrum calculated for low values of κ for multiple ions, in Figure 10 we show a portion of the X-ray spectrum at 14-18 Å observable by the MaGIXS instrument (Savage et al 2023), currently scheduled for second launch in 2024. There, three spectra are shown, a Maxwellian one in black, a κ = 2 one in red, and κ = 1.7 spectrum in violet color.…”

“…However, we note that the present spectra are calculated for a simple case of constant log(T [K]) = 6.6; a value where the Fe XVII abundance is relatively low for κ = 1.7 (see Figure 2). The temperature is typically a parameter determined from observations using a range of synthetic spectrum calculations where the log(T [K]) can vary (see, for example, Figures 14 and 16 of Savage et al 2023, and the discussion therein). Nevertheless, our example calculations demonstrate that at least in principle it could be possible to distinguish the extreme case of κ = 1.7 even from the κ = 2 using the optically thin spectra of the solar corona.…”