Dr. S. Athiray Panchapakesan

Solar active regions are the brightest, hottest regions in the solar corona and have a strong concentration of magnetic field, which is believed to be responsible for the energy transport and plasma heating in the solar corona. Current observations indicate ARs are comprised of loop structures with a wide range of temperatures. One of the outstanding questions in solar physics is to observationally determine and/or constrain how the plasma is heated in the core of AR structures. Despite decades of observations in EUV and X-rays, the answer to this question is still elusive as existing solar observatories are sensitive to plasma cooling and can not provide discriminating observations. Therefore, next generation space instrumentation with high temperature diagnostics will acquire the \“smoking gun\” observations required to constrain heating events. In this talk I will motivate the science investigation of solar active regions emphasizing the significance of high temperature diagnostics. I will present two novel instruments (FOXSI*, MaGIXS**), which are designed to provide high temperature diagnostics using direct X-ray imaging spectroscopy. FOXSI and MaGIXS are NASA funded sounding rocket experiments, which have successfully flown and observed ARs. I will demonstrate my contribution to these instruments’ development involving X-ray optics testing, detector characterization, overall instrument calibration and flight data analysis. I will discuss interesting scientific observations and results of ARs from these two missions. * - Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager ; ** - Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer