REX: X-ray experiment on the Water Recovery Rocket

TL;DR

This paper reports on the REX mission, a suborbital rocket flight testing X-ray telescopes and sensors for space applications, demonstrating successful deployment, data collection, and hardware recovery for future satellite missions.

Contribution

It introduces a dual X-ray telescope payload with Lobster-Eye optics on a sounding rocket, assessing technology readiness for space deployment.

Findings

Successful deployment and recovery of hardware

Effective data collection from X-ray telescopes

Validation of onboard sensors for future missions

Abstract

This paper presents Rocket Experiment (REX) that was part of a dual payload rocket campaign for NASA's sounding rocket Black Brant IX with water recovery technology. This mission was a suborbital sounding rocket flight that was launched and recovered on April 4, 2018 and targeted the Vela supernova remnant. The purpose of REX was to classify the Technology Readiness Level of onboard devices designed for space applications. The devices were two wide-field X-ray telescopes consisting of a combination of Lobster-Eye (LE) optics with an uncooled Timepix detector (256 x 256 px @ 55 um), and additional sensors. The first telescope uses a two-dimensional combination of LE modules with a focal length of 1 m and a Field of View (FOV) of 1.0 x 1.2 deg and operates in the energy range of 3 - 60 keV. The second telescope was a one-dimensional LE with a focal length of 250 mm and a FOV of 2.7 x 8.0 deg for the energy range 3 - 40 keV. The X-ray telescopes were supplemented by a camera in the visible spectrum with 1,280 x 1,024 px resolution, which was used to obtain images of the observed sources and to verify the resulting pointing of the rocket carrier. Other devices also include infrared array sensors and inertial measurement units tested for future small satellite missions. The data handler and communication system were built using the Robot Operating System, and both the system and the electronics were deployed and operated in flight. The hardware was successfully recovered after the launch and the data were extracted.