University of Pennsylvania Astronomy Seminar

The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), an international JAXA/NASA collaboration including participation from ESA, will be an advanced X-ray observatory capable of carrying out a science program that will address some of the most important questions in astrophysics in the 2020s. Scheduled to launch in 2022, XRISM is essentially a rebuild of the Hitomi (Astro-H) spacecraft that was lost due to an operational mishap early in the mission in 2016. Resolve, the primary instrument on XRISM, is a high-resolution, non-dispersive X-ray spectrometer operating between 0.3-12 keV, providing high-resolution (~5 eV) spectroscopic capabilities in this critical energy band with a response peaking around the ubiquitous 6.4 keV Fe K-alpha line. A wide-field imager, Xtend, will offer simultaneous coverage over nearly a 40’ square field of view, with ~1’ spatial resolution. In this talk, I will highlight some of the scientific topics that XRISM will address, in addition to providing a general status update on the mission. I will also present the XRISM Guest Scientist program, which allows the community to get involved in the early XRISM science, and the broad parameters of the GO program, through which allows the community to pursue a wide range of scientific objectives.