Science with XRISM

The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), an international collaboration led by JAXA and involving major participation from NASA and ESA, will employ an advanced X-ray observatory with capabilities to carry out a science program to address some of the important questions of present-day astrophysics. XRISM is essentially a rebuild of the the Hitomi (Astro-H) spacecraft that was lost due to an operational mishap early in the mission in 2016, but only employs two of the original four instruments on Hitomi. The Resolve Soft X-ray Spectrometer is being developed jointly by a team led by NASA/GSFC and institutions in Japan under the direction of JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. It is a high-resolution, non-dispersive X-ray spectrometer operating between 0.3-12 keV. It is the core instrument on XRISM, providing a high-resolution spectroscopic capability (~ 5 eV) for the mission and covering the energy band where all of the astrophysically abundant elements have characteristic emission lines that can be used for a wide range of spectral studies of matter under extreme conditions.

With XRISM scheduled to launch in 2022, the time to prepare for the coming era of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy is now. The goal of this special session will be to discuss the unique science that XRISM will enable. We will share the targets that have been selected for the Performance Verification (PV) phase of the mission, a six-month phase following checkout and calibration during which scientifically interesting targets will be observed by the XRISM Science Team. The selection of these targets will be chosen by a review process that is internal to the XRISM team. We anticipate that around 50 targets will be selected for the PV phase, and we will discuss the various science themes that will be addressed by the observations of these targets.