Abstract:

Hitomi (also known as ASTRO-H) was an international X-ray observatory, launched on February 17, 2016 from Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. This satellite had four types of scientific instruments, covering a broad energy range from 0.3 keV up to 600 keV in order to study high-energy phenomena in the universe seen in a wide variety of objects from black holes to clusters of galaxies. Particularly, a micro-calorimeter flown with the satellite opened a new window of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy for diffuse sources with an excellent energy resolution of 5 eV at 6 keV. Although the satellite was lost, the micro-calorimeter system, which must be kept in an extremely low temperature at 50 milli-kelvin, had been working perfectly and recorded its great performance. The other instruments (X-ray CCDs, the Hard X-ray Imagers, and the Soft Gamma-ray Detectors) also worked very well until the sudden end of the mission. In this talk, I will present the achieved in-orbit performance of these instruments and scientific results of the Perseus Cluster from the very initial operations. I will also review and discuss the operations, calibrations, and observations during the initial phases of the mission, as well as future prospects.

Bio:

Hirokazu Odaka is a research associate at KIPAC, Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Tokyo in physics in 2011. Then, he worked for JAXA as a post-doc on development and testing of the ASTRO-H satellite and its science program. He has studied both instrumentation, particularly hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray detectors, and astrophysical modeling of accreting sources using his Monte Carlo radiative transfer simulation code. In late 2015, a few months before the launch of the satellite, he moved to Stanford for science enhancement programs with ASTRO-H.