GSFC's Multi-Wire Gas Proportional Counter

The Goddard X-ray group made its appearance in 1964 as a one person (Elihu Boldt) appendage to the well established cosmic ray group, then headed by Frank MacDonald. This discipline proximity was crucial because it meant superb technical support from the start, which allowed the fledging group to quickly advance toward directions of choice. When I became the 2nd member of the group in 1966, the new discipline still relied on bulky gas counters, stacked to make up a usable detection area. Slim opportunities existed for timing or spectral inferences. Elihu's strong interest in pursuing the reported diffuse cosmic radiation had to be set aside, as improving this situation appeared to be years away. Cosmic ray researchers had long used charged particle timing techniques for cleaning up their data, but those appeared irrelevant for our purposes because of the large, background generating, mass of the gas containment vessels and the slow drift in the counter gas of the charge from photon interaction sites to the counter anode. We had to deal with these realities in whatever choices we made for our future instruments. The multi-wire gas proportional counter emerged from our still small group in the late1960s, demonstrating on several rocket and balloon flights a greatly reduced detector background, improved event timing and adequate resolution for addressing key spectral features. Three of these detectors, flown in 1975 on NASA's 8th orbiting solar observatory, were successfully used for some 3 years to conduct non dispersive, 1-10 keV spectroscopy on many galactic and extragalactic sources, including several clusters of galaxies. In 1977 we flew a set of larger detectors on the first of NASA's High Energy Astrophysical Observatories (HEAO). These were specifically designed for the study of the X-ray background. Finally, the largest instruments of this family were flown in 1995 by our group on NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, RXTE, which observed over a remarkable 16 year mission, msec pulsars, transient sources, galactic and extragalactic black holes, among others.