• DOI:10.1007/S11207-005-7416-X
• Corpus ID: 119351649

The NOAA Goes-12 Solar X-Ray Imager (SXI) 1. Instrument, Operations, and Data

@article{Hill2005TheNG,
  title={The NOAA Goes-12 Solar X-Ray Imager (SXI) 1. Instrument, Operations, and Data},
  author={Steven Marc Hill and Victor J. Pizzo and Christopher Balch and Douglas Alan Biesecker and Patricia Lee Bornmann and Ernest G. Hildner and L. D. Lewis and Richard Grubb and M. P. Husler and Kevin Prendergast and J. Vickroy and Sue Greer and Thomas Defoor and D. C. Wilkinson and Ronald J. Hooker and Patricia Mulligan and Eric G. Chipman and Hyre Bysal and J. Paul Douglas and Robert Reynolds and John Davis and Karen S. Wallace and K. Russell and Kathleen Freestone and Deborah R. Bagdigian and T. Page and Stephen Kerns and Robert Hoffman and Sandra Cauffman and Martin A. Davis and R. Studer and François Berthiaume and Timo T. Saha and G. D. Berthiume and H. Farthing and Frank Zimmermann},
  journal={Solar Physics},
  year={2005},
  volume={226},
  pages={255-281}
}

• S. Hill, V. Pizzo, +33 authors F. Zimmermann
• Published 1 February 2005
• Physics, Environmental Science
• Solar Physics

The Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) was launched 23 July 2001 on NOAA’s GOES-12 satellite and completed post-launch testing 20 December 2001. Beginning 22 January 2003 it has provided nearly uninterrupted, full-disk, soft X-ray solar images, with a continuous frame rate significantly exceeding that for previous similar instruments. The SXI provides images with a 1 min cadence and a single-image (adjustable) dynamic range near 100. A set of metallic thin-film filters provides temperature discrimination in the 0.6 – 6.0 nm bandpass. The spatial resolution of approximately 10 arcsec FWHM is sampled with 5 arcsec pixels. Three instrument degradations have occurred since launch, two affecting entrance filters and one affecting the detector high-voltage system. This work presents the SXI instrument, its operations, and its data processing, including the impacts of the instrument degradations. A companion paper (Pizzo et al., this issue) presents SXI performance prior to an instrument degradation that occurred on 5 November 2003 and thus applies to more than 420000 soft X-ray images of the Sun.