The two space agencies of Japan and the United States are prepping for a major launch Saturday, August 26, that promises to fundamentally alter our perspective of the cosmos. Exploding stars, near-light-speed particle jets powered by black holes, wildly swirling galaxy clusters — humanity is about to get an unprecedented view of some of the hottest and most extreme objects in space thanks to the XRISM initiative (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, pronounced "crism").
XRISM, a collaboration between NASA and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), features a telescope named Resolve that is a microcalorimeter spectrometer, which is an instrument actually colder than the iciest known locations in the universe. It can measure the unique "fingerprints" of X-ray energies from observed objects, later creating visible color spectra out of the invisible, an astonishing range of X-rays (from 400 to 12,000 electron volts), which can unveil the evolution of the universe and the structure of spacetime, for example, by observing supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies.
