The X-Ray Imaging Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) is a JAXA/NASA collaborative mission, with ESA participation, with the objective to investigate X-ray celestial objects in the Universe with high-throughput, high-resolution spectroscopy. XRISM is expected to launch in 2021 (TBR) on a JAXA H-2A rocket.
The XRISM payload consists of two instruments:
- Resolve, a soft X-ray spectrometer, which combines a lightweight Soft X-ray Telescope paired with a X-ray Calorimeter Spectrometer, and provides non-dispersive 5-7 eV energy resolution in the 0.3-12 keV bandpass with a field of view of about 3 arcmin.
- Xtend, a soft X-ray Imager, is a CCD detector with a larger the field, at the focus of the second lightweights Soft X-ray Telescope in the energy range of 0.4-13 keV
Their characteristics are similar to the SXS and SXI respectively flown on Hitomi and XRISM is designed to recover the science capability lost with the Hitomi incident.
The University of Geneva, in collaboration with the SRON (Netherlands), will develop and provide the Filter wheel electronics and mechanics for the Resolve instrument, together with the Modulated X-ray Sources (MXSs). The latter will be used for the calibrations of the X-ray spectrometer.
Note that the mission was previously called