We present a status report on CHIPS, the Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer. CHIPS is the first NASA University-Class Explorer (UNEX) project, and was launched on January 13, 2003.
The grazing incidence CHIPS spectrograph is surveying selected regions of the sky for diffuse emission in the comparatively unexplored wavelength band between 90 and 260 Å. These data are providing important new constraints on the temperature, ionization state, and emission measure of hot plasma in the "local bubble" of the interstellar medium.
|