Vibration Isolation Design for the Micro-X Rocket Payload

Sarah N.T. Heine, Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, John M. Rutherford, Patrick Wikus, Phil Oakley, Frederick S. Porter, Dan McCammon

(Submitted on 13 Oct 2013)

Micro-X is a NASA-funded, sounding rocket-borne X-ray imaging spectrometer that will allow high precision measurements of velocity structure, ionization state and elemental composition of extended astrophysical systems. One of the biggest challenges in payload design is to maintain the temperature of the detectors during launch. There are several vibration damping stages to prevent energy transmission from the rocket skin to the detector stage, which causes heating during launch.

Each stage should be more rigid than the outer stages to achieve vibrational isolation. We describe a major design effort to tune the resonance frequencies of these vibration isolation stages to reduce heating problems prior to the projected launch in the summer of 2014.

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, LTD15 Conference Proceedings

Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det)

Cite as: arXiv:1310.3512 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1310.3512v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)

Submission history From: Sarah Heine [v1] Sun, 13 Oct 2013 20:07:50 GMT (8855kb) 

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