S056 x-ray telescope experiment on the Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount

Abstract

This paper describes the S056 x-ray instrument which was carried aboard the Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount as part of the solar instrument cluster. The instrument, which was built at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, consisted of a glancing incidence x-ray telescope to record solar images in the 6–40-Å region, together with an x-ray event analyzer to monitor the total solar soft x-ray flux in several wavelength bands. The x-ray telescope used film as a recording medium and thin foil filters to isolate specific wavelength bands. The instrument subsystems are described in detail and typical results presented.