The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrograph (MaGIXS)

The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrograph (MaGIXS) is a proposed sounding rocket experiment designed to observe spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra of the solar corona for the first time. The instrument is a purely grazing-incidence design, consisting of aWolter Type-1 sector telescope and a slit spectrograph. The telescope mirror is a monolithic Zerodur mirror with both the parabolic and hyperbolic surfaces. The spectrograph comprises a pair of paraboloid mirrors acting as a collimator and reimaging mirror, and a planar varied-line-space grating, with reflective surfaces operate at a graze angle of 2 degrees. This produces a flat spectrum on a detector covering a wavelength range of 6-24A (0.5-1.2 keV). The design achieves 20 mA spectral resolution (10 mA /pixel) and 5 arcsec spatial resolution (2.5 arcsec / pixel) over an 8-arcminute long slit. The spectrograph is currently being fabricated as a laboratory prototype. A flight candidate telescope mirror is also under development.