On April 17, the space shuttle left the ISS and the ISS attitude returned to normal. Now the south camera looks south. The first calibration for 1550V cameras were done. All-sky maps were replotted using both 1650V and 1550V cameras since April 11. One camera (A-camera #0) is still out of operation leaving a small blank in the all-sky map.
all sky image on April 11, 2010.
MAXI is located in the front (moving direction of ISS ) in the normal attitude of ISS. When the space shuttle docks, ISS turns back and MAXI becomes in the back side. During this period, the Horizontal camera looks back instead of looking forward. The north camera looks south. On April 7,2010, ISS turned back for Space shuttle docking. The blank region of the north camera moved to the south, around the Galactic center.
The south camera (A camera 0) is operating in lower high voltage (1550V) to expand the life time. The high voltage of other two cameras (B camera 1 and B camera 2) were also reduced. The calibration of those cameras is undergoing and the data of those cameras are excluded in the MAXI home page now. The calibration time is estimated one or two weeks.
The all-sky image taken on April 8, 2010, after the ISS turn-back. The north camera covers the south region, making a blank near the galactic center.
MAXI/GSC all-sky movie is attached.
(You need Windows Media Player for watching.)
Each one frame correspondence to accumulated one day GSC observation.
You can see various famous X-ray sources.
This is an X-ray all-sky image from the MAXI GSC observations from August 15 to October 29, 2009. The color indicates the hardness of the X-ray sources: the red sources are “soft”, i.e. emit more low-energy X-rays, while the blue sources are “hard”, i.e. emit more X-rays with higher energies.
Press release:
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/11/20091126_maxi_e.html
(Japanese) http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/11/20091126_maxi_j.html
The “First Light” image of MAXI has been released. It is shown at the top page of this site. In the first light image of MAXI, accumulated with the GSC for one ISS orbit, we can easily recognize about 20 bright Galactic sources. A preliminary analysis suggests that GSC achieved about 20-30 mCrab sensitivity in one orbit, mostly consistent with the pre-flight estimation (Matsuoka et al 2009, accepted for PASJ, http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0631).
We will spend about two month to understand the instrument characteristics in orbit, the flight operations, and data processing before we start public release of the images and light curves.
