The Suzaku spacecraft weighs about 1,600 kg (3500 pounds) and it will be 7.1 meters (23 feet) long after the Extensible Optical Bench is extended in orbit. The five X-ray Telescopes (XRTs) and all the instruments (the X-Ray Spectrometer, the 4 X-ray Imaging Spectrometers, and the Hard X-ray Detector) will point in the same direction. This allows scientists to simultaneously study cosmic X-ray sources using the different capabilities of the various onboard instruments.
X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS)
The detectors in the X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) are X-ray microcalorimeters. They work by monitoring the temperature of a tiny piece of silicon, and measuring the temperature rise that results when it absorbs an X-ray photon. As you might imagine, measuring the temperature increase from a single photon is fairly difficult. The detectors need to be kept extremely cold, almost to absolute zero (60 milliKelvin or 0.06 Kelvin, about -273 C, or about -460 F), requiring a complex cryogenic system which includes liquid helium and solid neon.The XRS has a limited life of about 2.5 years before the neon and/or helium runs out. The XRS is special because, for the first time, it will provide both high spectral resolution (measuring small differences in the energies of X-ray photons) and high throughput (measuring lots of X rays) in one instrument.
X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS)
There are 4 X-ray Imaging Spectrometers (XIS), each with a 1024x1024-pixel X-ray-sensitive Charge Coupled Device (a CCD, similar to what's in your digital camera, but sensitive to much more energetic light). The use of CCDs for astronomical X-ray spectroscopy was pioneered by the ASCA mission starting in 1993. The XIS has been developed by a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ISAS, the University of Kyoto, and the University of Osaka. It was fabricated by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.For more info, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/astro-e2/spacecraft/index.html
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