More than 40 years ago, X-ray astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center sought a way to improve the energy resolution of X-ray spectrometers for a proposed powerful X-Ray observatory to be built by NASA. What emerged was something entirely new – the thermal detection of individual X-ray photons and the ability to measure their energies with extreme precision. The X-ray microcalorimeter, as it is called, was used starting in the 1990’s to measure the spectrum of the diffuse X-ray background on a suborbital payload and has been in continuous use for laboratory atomic physics measurements. The Resolve X-Ray Spectrometer has now been deployed on the recently launched JAXA/NASA X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) to measure the spectra of a wide range of celestial objects and is revealing many new things about the part of the universe that mainly emits X-rays.

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