40 Years of X-ray Astronomy

Workshop in honor of Gordon Garmire's 70^th birthday
June 14-15, 2007

To celebrate the 70th birthday of Evan Pugh Professor Gordon P. Garmire, Penn State University is sponsoring a 2-day workshop on instrumentation in high energy astrophysics. The first part will review projects from the 1960s-2000s in which Gordon played a major role: OSO-3, HEAO-1, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This will be followed by brief overviews on recent science emerging from Gordon's Chandra team. The second part, which will dominate the workshop, will have presentations and discussion on current developments and future prospects for advanced technologies in high energy astrophysics.

Presentations      (PDF versions of slides)

Daniel Larson (PSU): Opening remarks

Instrumentation from the 1960s to the 2000s

George W. Clark (MIT): Early gamma-ray astronomy (text)

Dan McCammon (Wisc): X-ray astronomy: Sounding rocket days

France A. Cordova (UCR): Gordon Garmire and multiwavelength astrophysics

Martin C. Weisskopf (NASA/MSFC): The early days of AXAF-Chandra: 1976-1991

Harvey Tananbaum (SAO): The later days of AXAF-Chandra: 1991-1999

Mark Bautz (MIT): Some tales of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer

Recent science accomplishments

Frederick Baganoff (MIT): The Galactic Center

W. Niel Brandt (PSU): Deep cosmological X-ray surveys

Peter Mészàros (PSU): Astrophysics of gamma-ray bursts

John Nousek (PSU): Gamma-ray burst astronomy

Sangwook Park (PSU): Supernova remnants in the Chandra era

George Pavlov (PSU): Pulsar wind nebulae: New look with Chandra

Leisa Townsley (PSU): ACIS GTO investments in star formation science

Current and future developments in instrumentation

I Optics and gratings

Webster Cash (Colorado) Diffractive optics in X-ray astronomy

Mark Schattenburg (MIT) Nanofrabricated critical angle transmissions (CAT) gratings

David Lumb (ESA/ESTEC) ESA X-ray pore optics

II Detectors

David Burrows (PSU) Pixel detectors: Past. present, and future

Enectalí Figueroa-Feliciano (MIT) Microcalorimeters

Joanne Hill (NASA/USRA/GSFC) A burst-chasing X-ray polarimeter

David Lumb (ESTEC) ESA detector advances

Short contributions:

§      Mark Bautz (MIT) Active pixel sensor technologies at MIT

§      Elihu Boldt (NASA/GSFC) On the feasibility of seeing ISM bulk motions by means of Doppler shifted K x-rays (text)

§      Dan McCammon (Wisc) Low energy response on major space missions

§      Hiroshi Tsunemi (Osaka) Improvement of CCD technology in Japan

III Missions

Kim Weaver (NASA/GSFC) NASA’s X-ray astronomy program

Hiroshi Tsunemi (Osaka) Future X-ray missions in Japan: MAXI, FFAST, NeXT and more

Martin Elvis (SAO) Active X-ray optics for the next high resolution X-ray observatory

Short contributions:

§      David Burrows (PSU) Future European missions

§      Ann Hornschemeier (NASA/GSFC) The Constellation X-ray Mission

§      Enectalí Figueroa-Feliciano (MIT) Micro-X: The high resolution microcalorimeter X-ray imaging rocket

§      Dan McCammon (Wisc) The New Spectrum-X Gamma Mission