P75

Presentation Title:	Projected Performance of the Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager (SSAXI-Rocket) for the Hi-C Flare Rocket
Author(s):	Christopher Moore, Elias Aguirre-Contreras, Isaac Anderson, David Caldwell, Gabriel Dubinsky, Tom Gauron, Leon Golub, Laura Hayes, Ed Hertz, Johnny Ho, JaeSub Hong, Andrew Inglis, Almus Kenter, Adam Kobelski, Jeffrey Reep, Suzanne Romaine, Sophia Sánchez-Maes ; Sabrina Savage, Nicholas Thomas, Amy Winebarger

Abstract:

The Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager (SSAXI-Rocket) Instrument is a ride along instrument to the Hi-C Flare Rocket Launch campaign in April 2024. In the short 5-minute NASA Sounding Rocket flight, SSAXI-Rocket will measure the soft X-ray near-peak emission phase of a GOES C-class or greater solar flare. The SSAXI-Rocket instrument has peak sensitivity to 10 MK solar plasma, similar to the current Hi-C flare instruments, providing the exploration of the variability in heating and energy transport of Solar flares. SSAXI-Rocket combines small X-ray focusing optics (Wolter-1) with on-axis imaging resolution less than 10 arcseconds and high speed readout detector (CMOS), to image the flare soft X-rays at 5 hertz or faster, with minimized image saturation and pixel signal blooming. These high time cadence measurements can help uncover the soft X-ray intensity variations which can provide constraints on the intermittent heating processes in the magnetic loops.

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