National Aeronautics and Space Administration

I’m now in a nearly circular orbit at an altitude of about 565 km. Right where they wanted me to be.

My NASA friends continue to set my operating parameters and electronic thresholds in preparation to operate my fancy refrigerator (which gets me down to 60 millikelvin). They turned on the magnets for a short time yesterday. So far so good. They’ll operate the fridge fully some time next week.

Everything the astronauts say about looking down on the Earth is true. Going around the earth once every 90 minutes or so, it goes by kind of quick. But it’s very beautiful, and never quite the same from one orbit to the next.

But of course, we didn’t come up here to look down. We came here to look up! After they get done with turning everything on and testing (of course!), that’s what we’ll be doing.

Oh – if you want to get up early in the morning to see me in the sky, here are some opportunities in the next few days:

DATE	TIME (EDT)	ELEVATION ABOVE HORIZON
July 24	4:28 AM	23 degrees
July 26	4:43 AM	24 degrees
July 28	4:57 AM	21 degrees

It might not be easy, since I’ll pass only about 20 degrees above your southern horizon. But I’ll wave as I go by!

I thought they wouldn’t extend the optical bench for another week, but they did it today! The spacecraft mechanical engineers said it was “perfect.” But of course!

Juli also sent up a few commands to me to turn on some of my electronics. I heard it loud and clear. So I’m ready whenever they are to look start looking at some objects. (Guess that still won’t be for a while.)

Juli also sent some really cool information about our new name, Suzaku. In the 7th century, the Japanese emperors built capital cities modeled on Chinese cities. This included gates at the North, South, East and West entrances. Each of these gates is guarded by a deity. Suzaku is the guardian of the South gate, and to the Japanese became a leading deity in that time.

Here’s the Japanese for Suzaku:

It’s also the right color red!

In addition, Suzaku governs the southern part of the sky. And I’ll be looking at some really important objects (like the Virgo Galaxy Cluster) in that part of the sky.

Oh, yeh, we made Astronomy Picture of the Day!

A pioneering X-ray detector, developed jointly by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) was successfully launched on a major new space observatory.

The high-resolution X-ray Spectrometer (XRS) was launched on board the Suzaku space observatory at 11:30 p.m. EDT, July 9 (12:30 p.m., July 10 local time) from Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan.

The highly anticipated Suzaku mission complements NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton mission. The observatories support the study of exotic objects and regions in space that radiate predominantly in X-rays. Suzaku is a mythical, divine bird symbolizing renewal. It was previously called Astro-E2.

Key targets for Suzaku include black holes; the million-degree gas from star explosions, which is filled with newly created elements such as oxygen and calcium; and the optically invisible gas between stars and galaxies, which comprises most of the ordinary mass in the universe.

“Suzaku will fill a vital gap in our understanding of the X-ray universe,” said Goddard’s Dr. Richard Kelley, principal investigator for the U.S. contribution.

Along with the XRS on Suzaku are four X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS) instruments developed in collaboration among Japanese institutions and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Hard X-Ray Detector (HXD), built by the University of Tokyo, ISAS and other Japanese institutions is also on board.

The XRS and XIS instruments will analyze X-ray photons focused by individual telescopes. They were built at Goddard by a team led by Dr. Peter Serlemitsos, in cooperation with Nagoya University and other institutions in Japan. The HXD uses a tested yet improved technology.

Suzaku launched on an M-V rocket and will attain a near-Earth, circular orbit at approximately 560 kilometers (345 miles). The observatory’s expected mission lifetime is five years. Suzaku is the fifth in a series of Japanese satellites devoted to studying celestial X-ray sources.