Rehan Quraishi with Prof. Dan McCammon and Dr. Dawn Michalski

Department of Space Physics, UW-Madison

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and UW-Madison are working on a joint sounding rocket project to study X-rays in the interstellar medium. The payload of the rocket, a micro-calorimeter, absorbs individual X-ray photons and detects the change in temperature caused by each photon as a pulse.  Unfortunately, the payload also detects some noise, and weaker X-ray pulses mix in with this noise. Due to the limited bandwidth available to the telemetry system, the sensitivity of the micro-calorimeter must be reduced so that only valid and significant data is sent (live) back to the ground. Doing so removes not only noise, but also valuable data from weaker pulses.

Currently we are developing a method of storing the pulse data digitally onto a compact flash disk. Doing so will allow us to preserve all the data from the micro-calorimeter and digitally filter out noise. Also, because of the expansive capacities of compact flash disks, we will be able to store more data. In order to do this, pulse data from the micro-calorimeter will be converted into digital data via an Analog/Digital Converter, and then written to a compact flash card through a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board. Ultimately, if all goes well, the data from our next flight will be sent live back to ground, and will simultaneously be stored onto a compact flash disk on board the rocket.