NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is making advances in astronomy with its 122-megapixel, mostly infrared photos captured 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Impressive stuff. However, the space agency’s latest sky-peeper takes a different approach, conducting groundbreaking space research using 36 pixels. It’s not a typo – 36 pixels, not 36 megapixels.
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), pronounced “crism,” is a collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission’s satellite launched into orbit last September and has been searching the cosmos ever since for answers to some of science’s most complex questions. The mission’s imaging instrument, Resolve, has a 36-pixel image sensor.
It’s been a hot minute since we could count the individual pixels on an image chip, but here we are… The array measures 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) on a side. The device produces a spectrum of X-ray sources between 400 and 12,000 electron volts – up to 5,000 times the energy of visible light – with unprecedented detail. Photo credit: NASA/XRISM/Caroline Kilbourne
“Resolve is more than a camera. Its detector measures the temperature of every X-ray beam that hits it,” said Brian Williams, NASA scientist for the XRISM project at Goddard, in a press release. “We call Resolve a microcalorimeter spectrometer because each of its 36 pixels measures tiny amounts of heat given off by each incident X-ray, allowing us to see the chemical fingerprints of the elements that make up the sources in unprecedented detail.”
Equipped with an extraordinary array of pixels, the Resolve instrument can detect “soft” X-rays with energy about 5,000 times greater than the wavelengths of visible light. Its main focus is exploring the hottest cosmic regions, the largest structures and the most massive celestial objects, such as supermassive black holes. Despite the limited pixel count, each pixel in Resolve is remarkable and capable of producing a rich spectrum of visual data, spanning an energy range of 400 to 12,000 electron volts.
The agency says the instrument can sense the movements of elements within a target, essentially providing a three-dimensional perspective. Gas moving towards us emits slightly higher energies than usual, while gas moving away emits slightly lower energies. This ability opens new avenues for scientific exploration. For example, it allows scientists to understand the flow of hot gas in galaxy clusters and closely track the movement of various elements in the remnants of supernova explosions.