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125-657: Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager ( RHESSI , originally High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager or HESSI or Explorer 81 ) was a NASA solar flare observatory. It was the sixth mission in the Small Explorer program (SMEX), selected in October 1997 and launched on 5 February 2002, at 20:58:12 UTC . Its primary mission was to explore the physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares. The spacecraft re-entered Earth's atmosphere at 00:21 UTC on 20 April 2023, 21 years after its launch. HESSI

250-607: A decade of reliance on the Russians. In 2019, NASA announced the Artemis program , intending to return to the Moon and establish a permanent human presence. This was paired with the Artemis Accords with partner nations to establish rules of behavior and norms of space commercialization on the Moon. In 2023, NASA established the Moon to Mars Program office. The office is designed to oversee

375-518: A friendship over their shared interest in astronomy, and eventually came up with the idea of starting a firm to produce precision optics. Perkin raised US$ 15,000 from his relatives, while Elmer added US$ 5,000, and the firm was initially set up as a partnership on 19 April 1937. Initially, they worked from a small office in Manhattan , but soon opened a production facility in Jersey City . They incorporated

500-650: A full range of angular orientations but for a small range of spatial source dimensions. Multiple RMCs, each with different slit widths, provided coverage over a full range of flare source sizes. Images were then reconstructed from the set of measured Fourier components in exact mathematical analogy to multi-baseline radio interferometry. RHESSI provided spatial resolution of 2 arcseconds at X-ray energies from ~4 keV to ~100 keV, 7 arcseconds to ~400 keV, and 36 arcseconds for gamma-ray lines and continuum emission above 1 MeV. RHESSI could also see gamma rays coming from off-solar directions. The more energetic gamma rays passed through

625-581: A honeycomb structure to further reduce the weight. The spacecraft was manufactured in Gilbert, Arizona by Spectrum Astro, Inc. The Imaging Telescope Assembly consisted of the telescope tube, grid trays, Solar aspect system (SAS), and Roll angle system (RAS). It was constructed, assembled, aligned, and tested at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland . The front and rear grid trays were attached to

750-466: A human in space, develop tracking and control systems, and identify other issues associated with human spaceflight. While much of NASA's attention turned to space, it did not put aside its aeronautics mission. Early aeronautics research attempted to build upon the X-1's supersonic flight to build an aircraft capable of hypersonic flight . The North American X-15 was a joint NASA–U.S. Air Force program, with

875-792: A laboratory located in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania specializing in screening newborns for various inborn errors of metabolism such as phenylketonuria , hypothyroidism , and sickle-cell disease . It renamed the laboratory PerkinElmer Genetics, Inc. In May 2011, PerkinElmer announced the signature of an agreement to acquire CambridgeSoft, and the successful acquisition of ArtusLabs. In September 2011, PerkinElmer bought Caliper Life Sciences for US$ 600 million. In December 2014 PerkinElmer acquired Perten Instruments for US$ 266 million to expand in food testing. In January 2016, PerkinElmer acquired Swedish firm Vanadis Diagnostics. In February 2016 PerkinElmer acquired Delta Instruments. In January 2017,

1000-526: A large presence in Monmouth County, New Jersey , with some 1,700 staff making it one of the county's largest private employers. Its plant in Oceanport had 800 employees alone. By the early-mid-1980s the computing group had sales of $ 259 million; while profitable, it tended to have reduced visibility within the computing industry due to being owned by a diversified parent. The Wollongong Group provided

1125-487: A mechanical cryocooler. Germanium provided not only detections by the photoelectric effect , but inherent spectroscopy through the charge deposition of the incoming ray. The crystals were housed in a cryostat, and mounted with low-conductivity straps. A tubular telescope structure formed the bulk of the spacecraft. Its purpose was to hold the collimators above the Ge crystals at known, fixed positions. The satellite bus consisted of

1250-485: A merger between divisions of what had been two S&P 500 companies, EG&G Inc. (formerly NYSE :  EGG ) of Wellesley, Massachusetts and Perkin-Elmer (formerly NYSE :  PKN ) of Norwalk, Connecticut . On May 28, 1999, the non-government side of EG&G Inc. purchased the Analytical Instruments Division of Perkin-Elmer, its traditional business segment, for US$ 425 million, also assuming

1375-468: A more reliable system. Perkin-Elmer responded with the Microprojector, which was essentially a large photocopier system. The mask was placed in a holder and never touched the surface of the chip. Instead, the image was projected onto the surface. Making this work required a complex 16-element lens system that focussed a narrow range of wavelengths of light onto the mask. The remainder of the light from

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1500-412: A pattern, the "mask", which was pressed onto the surface of the silicon wafer as part of the photolithography process. Small bits of dirt or photoresist would stick the mask and ruin the patterning for subsequent chips, and it was not uncommon for the vast majority of the chips from a given wafer to malfunction. The Air Force, which by the late 1960s was highly reliant on integrated circuits , desired

1625-570: A permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade. In 1985, NASA proposed the Space Station Freedom , which both the agency and President Reagan intended to be an international program. While this would add legitimacy to the program, there were concerns within NASA that the international component would dilute its authority within the project, having never been willing to work with domestic or international partners as true equals. There

1750-628: A possible source of antimatter at the center of the Milky Way and observing that the majority of gamma-ray bursts occur outside of the Milky Way galaxy. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched from the Columbia on STS-93 in 1999, observing black holes, quasars , supernova , and dark matter . It provided critical observations on the Sagittarius A* black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and

1875-532: A space station since the agency was created. In 1973, following the end of the Apollo lunar missions, NASA launched its first space station, Skylab , on the final launch of the Saturn   V. Skylab reused a significant amount of Apollo and Saturn hardware, with a repurposed Saturn   V third stage serving as the primary module for the space station. Damage to Skylab during its launch required spacewalks to be performed by

2000-525: A split of PerkinElmer resulted in one part, comprising applied, food and enterprise services businesses, being sold to the private equity firm New Mountain Capital for $ 2.45 billion and thus no longer being public but kept the PerkinElmer name. The other part, comprising life sciences and diagnostics businesses, remained public but required a new name, which in 2023 was announced as Revvity, Inc. Richard Perkin

2125-540: A strong presence in the military field through the 1960s and at the same time was significantly involved with OAO-3 a 36-inch Ultra Violet Space Telescope, Skylab and their major contribution to the Apollo program was the CO 2 sensor that saved the astronauts during the Apollo 13 failure. They were a primary supplier of the optical systems used in many reconnaissance platforms, first in aircraft and high-altitude balloons , and then in reconnaissance satellites . A significant advance

2250-497: Is revealed by gamma-ray lines and continuum. The proximity of the Sun means not only that these high-energy emissions are orders of magnitude more intense than from any other cosmic source but also that they can be better resolved, both spatially and temporally. Since X-rays are not easily reflected or refracted, imaging in X-rays is difficult. One solution to this problem is to selectively block

2375-658: The Big Bang . The James Webb Space Telescope , named after the NASA administrator who lead the Apollo program, is an infrared observatory launched in 2021. The James Webb Space Telescope is a direct successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, intended to observe the formation of the first galaxies. Other space telescopes include the Kepler space telescope , launched in 2009 to identify planets orbiting extrasolar stars that may be Terran and possibly harbor life. The first exoplanet that

2500-753: The Environmental Science Services Administration on a series of weather satellites and the agency launched its experimental Applications Technology Satellites into geosynchronous orbit. NASA's first dedicated Earth observation satellite, Landsat , was launched in 1972. This led to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jointly developing the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite and discovering Ozone depletion . NASA had been pursuing spaceplane development since

2625-676: The Europa and observed that the moon may hold ice or liquid water. A joint NASA- European Space Agency - Italian Space Agency mission, Cassini–Huygens , was sent to Saturn 's moon Titan , which, along with Mars and Europa, are the only celestial bodies in the Solar System suspected of being capable of harboring life. Cassini discovered three new moons of Saturn and the Huygens probe entered Titan's atmosphere. The mission discovered evidence of liquid hydrocarbon lakes on Titan and subsurface water oceans on

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2750-822: The International Space Station (ISS) along with the Commercial Crew Program , and oversees the development of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System for the lunar Artemis program . NASA's science division is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System ; advancing heliophysics through the efforts of the Science Mission Directorate 's Heliophysics Research Program; exploring bodies throughout

2875-742: The Johnson Space Center as the lead center for the design, development, and manufacturing of the Space Shuttle orbiter , while the Marshall Space Flight Center would lead the development of the launch system. NASA's series of lifting body aircraft, culminating in the joint NASA-U.S. Air Force Martin Marietta X-24 , directly informed the development of the Space Shuttle and future hypersonic flight aircraft. Official development of

3000-634: The Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and Mars Pathfinder , deploying the first Mars rover, Sojourner . During the early 2000s, the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter reached the planet and in 2004 the Sprit and Opportunity rovers landed on the Red Planet. This was followed in 2005 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2007 Phoenix Mars lander. The 2012 landing of Curiosity discovered that

3125-540: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to give the U.S. space development effort a distinct civilian orientation, emphasizing peaceful applications in space science . It has since led most of America's space exploration programs, including Project Mercury , Project Gemini , the 1968–1972 Apollo Moon landing missions, the Skylab space station, and the Space Shuttle . Currently, NASA supports

3250-654: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Despite being the birthplace of aviation, by 1914 the United States recognized that it was far behind Europe in aviation capability. Determined to regain American leadership in aviation, the United States Congress created the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1914 and established NACA in 1915 to foster aeronautical research and development. Over

3375-543: The Orbiting Geophysical Observatory in the 1960s and 1970s to look down at Earth and observe its interactions with the Sun. The Uhuru satellite was the first dedicated x-ray telescope, mapping 85% of the sky and discovering a large number of black holes . Launched in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Great Observatories program are among NASA's most powerful telescopes. The Hubble Space Telescope

3500-631: The STS-1 mission, designed to serve as a flight test for the new spaceplane. NASA intended for the Space Shuttle to replace expendable launch systems like the Air Force's Atlas , Delta , and Titan and the European Space Agency 's Ariane . The Space Shuttle's Spacelab payload, developed by the European Space Agency, increased the scientific capabilities of shuttle missions over anything NASA

3625-616: The STS-60 mission in 1994 and the Discovery rendezvoused, but did not dock with, the Russian Mir in the STS-63 mission. This was followed by Atlantis' STS-71 mission where it accomplished the initial intended mission for the Space Shuttle, docking with a space station and transferring supplies and personnel. The Shuttle- Mir program would continue until 1998, when a series of orbital accidents on

3750-524: The Solar System with advanced robotic spacecraft such as New Horizons and planetary rovers such as Perseverance ; and researching astrophysics topics, such as the Big Bang , through the James Webb Space Telescope , the four Great Observatories , and associated programs. The Launch Services Program oversees launch operations for its uncrewed launches . NASA traces its roots to

3875-523: The Space Race when the Soviet Union gave up its lunar ambitions. As the first human to step on the surface of the Moon, Neil Armstrong uttered the now famous words: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. NASA would conduct six total lunar landings as part of the Apollo program, with Apollo   17 concluding the program in 1972. Wernher von Braun had advocated for NASA to develop

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4000-609: The Space Shuttle began in 1972, with Rockwell International contracted to design the orbiter and engines, Martin Marietta for the external fuel tank , and Morton Thiokol for the solid rocket boosters . NASA acquired six orbiters: the Enterprise , Columbia , Challenger , Discovery , Atlantis , and Endeavour The Space Shuttle program also allowed NASA to make major changes to its Astronaut Corps . While almost all previous astronauts were Air Force or Naval test pilots,

4125-405: The inner planets . Despite these successes, Congress was unwilling to fund further interplanetary missions and NASA Administrator James Webb suspended all future interplanetary probes to focus resources on the Apollo program. Following the conclusion of the Apollo program, NASA resumed launching interplanetary probes and expanded its space science program. The first planet tagged for exploration

4250-634: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) equipment industry. Analytical-instruments business was also operated from 1954 to 2001 in Germany , by the Bodenseewerk Perkin-Elmer GmbH located in Überlingen at Lake Constance , and England (Perkin Elmer Ltd) at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire . Perkin-Elmer was involved in computer manufacture for a time. The Perkin-Elmer Computer Systems Division

4375-490: The 1,000 watt mercury-vapor lamp was filtered out. Harold Hemstreet was convinced that the concept could be simplified, and Abe Offner began the development of a system using mirrors instead of lenses, which did not suffer from the multispectral focussing problems of lenses. The result of this research was the Projection Scanning Aligner, or Micralign , which made chip making an assembly-line task and improved

4500-420: The 1950s as a response to Soviet lunar exploration, however most missions ended in failure. The Lunar Orbiter program had greater success, mapping the surface in preparation for Apollo landings and measured Selenography , conducted meteoroid detection, and measured radiation levels. The Surveyor program conducted uncrewed lunar landings and takeoffs, as well as taking surface and regolith observations. Despite

4625-516: The 1960s, blending the administration's dual aeronautics and space missions. NASA viewed a spaceplane as part of a larger program, providing routine and economical logistical support to a space station in Earth orbit that would be used as a hub for lunar and Mars missions. A reusable launch vehicle would then have ended the need for expensive and expendable boosters like the Saturn V . In 1969, NASA designated

4750-655: The 44 commercial companies that contracted with NASA to deploy their satellites to return to expendable launch vehicles. When the Space Shuttle returned to flight with the STS-26 mission, it had undergone significant modifications to improve its reliability and safety. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and United States initiated the Shuttle- Mir program . The first Russian cosmonaut flew on

4875-508: The Army's Project Adam, served as the foundation for Project Mercury . NASA established the Space Task Group to manage the program, which would conduct crewed sub-orbital flights with the Army's Redstone rockets and orbital flights with the Air Force's Atlas launch vehicles. While NASA intended for its first astronauts to be civilians, President Eisenhower directed that they be selected from

5000-465: The Fluid Sciences division for approximately US$ 400 million; the aim of the selloff was to increase the strategic focus on its higher-growth health sciences and photonic markets. Following on from the selloff, a number of small businesses were acquired, including Spectral Genomics , Improvision , Evotec-Technologies , Euroscreen, ViaCell, and Avalon Instruments. The brand "Evotec-Technologies" remains

5125-558: The Keplar space telescope confirmed was Kepler-22b , orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. NASA also launched a number of different satellites to study Earth, such as Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) in 1960, which was the first weather satellite. NASA and the United States Weather Bureau cooperated on future TIROS and the second generation Nimbus program of weather satellites. It also worked with

Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager - Misplaced Pages Continue

5250-548: The Martian interior. The 2021 Perseverance rover carried the first extraplanetary aircraft, a helicopter named Ingenuity . NASA also launched missions to Mercury in 2004, with the MESSENGER probe demonstrating as the first use of a solar sail . NASA also launched probes to the outer Solar System starting in the 1960s. Pioneer 10 was the first probe to the outer planets, flying by Jupiter , while Pioneer 11 provided

5375-472: The Moon and going to Mars. Embracing this approach, NASA's Commercial Crew Program started by contracting cargo delivery to the International Space Station and flew its first operational contracted mission on SpaceX Crew-1 . This marked the first time since the retirement of the Space Shuttle that NASA was able to launch its own astronauts on an American spacecraft from the United States, ending

5500-629: The Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard, the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency under Wernher von Braun . This left NASA firmly as the United States' civil space lead and the Air Force as the military space lead. Plans for human spaceflight began in the U.S. Armed Forces prior to NASA's creation. The Air Force's Man in Space Soonest project formed in 1956, coupled with

5625-454: The Perkin-Elmer 3210 and 3240 minicomputers. In 1985, the computing division of Perkin-Elmer was spun off as Concurrent Computer Corporation , with the goal of giving it and the parallel processing product a clearer identification within the computer industry. At first, the new company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Perkin-Elmer, but with the intentions of putting a minority ownership in

5750-593: The Perkin-Elmer name and forming the new PerkinElmer company, with new officers and a new board of directors. At the time, EG&G made products for diverse industries including automotive, medical, aerospace and photography. The old Perkin-Elmer Board of Directors and Officers remained at that reorganized company under its new name, PE Corporation . It had been the Life Sciences division of Perkin-Elmer, and its two component tracking stock business groups, Celera Genomics ( NYSE :  CRA ) and PE Biosystems (formerly NYSE :  PEB ), were centrally involved in

5875-503: The Pilotless Aircraft Research Division. The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age and kicked off the Space Race . Despite NACA's early rocketry program, the responsibility for launching the first American satellite fell to the Naval Research Laboratory 's Project Vanguard , whose operational issues ensured the Army Ballistic Missile Agency would launch Explorer 1 , America's first satellite, on February 1, 1958. The Eisenhower Administration decided to split

6000-422: The RHESSI mission was to combine, for the first time, high-resolution imaging in hard X-rays and gamma rays with high-resolution spectroscopy, so that a detailed energy spectrum could be obtained at each point of the image. This new approach enabled researchers to find out where these particles are accelerated and to what energies. Such information will advance understanding of the fundamental high-energy processes at

6125-409: The Russians be included. In 1993, the Clinton Administration announced that the Space Station Freedom would become the International Space Station in an agreement with the Russian Federation. This allowed the Russians to maintain their space program through an infusion of American currency to maintain their status as one of the two premier space programs. While the United States built and launched

6250-507: The Russians to fly to the International Space Station for four days, despite the opposition of NASA to the idea. Advocates of this new commercial approach for NASA included former astronaut Buzz Aldrin , who remarked that it would return NASA to its roots as a research and development agency, with commercial entities actually operating the space systems. Having corporations take over orbital operations would also allow NASA to focus all its efforts on deep space exploration and returning humans to

6375-422: The Solar System. Mars has long been a planet of intense fascination for NASA, being suspected of potentially having harbored life. Mariner 5 was the first NASA spacecraft to flyby Mars, followed by Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 . Mariner 9 was the first orbital mission to Mars. Launched in 1975, Viking program consisted of two landings on Mars in 1976. Follow-on missions would not be launched until 1996, with

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6500-404: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA was forced to rely on Russian Soyuz launches for its astronauts and the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle accelerated the station's completion. In the 1980s, right after the first flight of the Space Shuttle, NASA started a joint program with the Department of Defense to develop the Rockwell X-30 National Aerospace Plane. NASA realized that

6625-418: The Space Shuttle allowed NASA to begin recruiting more non-military scientific and technical experts. A prime example is Sally Ride , who became the first American woman to fly in space on STS-7 . This new astronaut selection process also allowed NASA to accept exchange astronauts from U.S. allies and partners for the first time. The first Space Shuttle flight occurred in 1981, when the Columbia launched on

6750-443: The Space Shuttle and expand space exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Constellation was intended to use a significant amount of former Space Shuttle equipment and return astronauts to the Moon. This program was canceled by the Obama Administration . Former astronauts Neil Armstrong , Gene Cernan , and Jim Lovell sent a letter to President Barack Obama to warn him that if the United States did not get new human spaceflight ability,

6875-478: The Space Shuttle began flying, selling it as an orbital laboratory, repair station, and a jumping off point for lunar and Mars missions. NASA found a strong advocate in President Ronald Reagan , who declared in a 1984 speech: America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight I am directing NASA to develop

7000-444: The Space Shuttle, while a massive technological accomplishment, would not be able to live up to all its promises. Designed to be a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, the X-30 had both civil and military applications. With the end of the Cold War , the X-30 was canceled in 1992 before reaching flight status. Following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, President Bush started the Constellation program to smoothly replace

7125-483: The Space Shuttle. Due to technical challenges, the spacecraft was cancelled in 2001. Despite this, it was the first time a commercial space company directly expended a significant amount of its resources into spacecraft development. The advent of space tourism also forced NASA to challenge its assumption that only governments would have people in space. The first space tourist was Dennis Tito , an American investment manager and former aerospace engineer who contracted with

7250-507: The Space Station Freedom was controversial, with much of the debate centering on cost. Several redesigns to reduce cost were conducted in the early 1990s, stripping away much of its functions. Despite calls for Congress to terminate the program, it continued, in large part because by 1992 it had created 75,000 jobs across 39 states. By 1993, President Bill Clinton attempted to significantly reduce NASA's budget and directed costs be significantly reduced, aerospace industry jobs were not lost, and

7375-399: The U.S. risked become a second or third-rate space power. As early as the Reagan Administration, there had been calls for NASA to expand private sector involvement in space exploration rather than do it all in-house. In the 1990s, NASA and Lockheed Martin entered into an agreement to develop the Lockheed Martin X-33 demonstrator of the VentureStar spaceplane, which was intended to replace

7500-491: The United States' military and civil spaceflight programs, which were organized together under the Defense Department 's Advanced Research Projects Agency . NASA was established on July 29, 1958, with the signing of the National Aeronautics and Space Act and it began operations on October 1, 1958. As the US's premier aeronautics agency, NACA formed the core of NASA's new structure by reassigning 8,000 employees and three major research laboratories. NASA also proceeded to absorb

7625-399: The X-rays. If the X-rays are blocked in a way that depends on the direction of the incoming photons, then it may be possible to reconstruct an image. The imaging capability of RHESSI was based on a Fourier transform technique using a set of 9 Rotational Modulation Collimators (RMCs) as opposed to mirrors and lenses. Each RMC consisted of two sets of widely spaced, fine-scale linear grids. As

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7750-399: The burst. Comparing signal strengths around the nine crystals, and front-to-back, then gave a coarse, two-dimensional position in space. When combined with high-resolution time stamps of the detector hits, the RHESSI solution could be cross-referenced on the ground with other spacecraft in the IPN ( Interplanetary Network ) to provide a fine solution. The large area and high sensitivities of

7875-413: The commercial version of the Unix port to the Interdata 7/32 hardware, known as Edition 7 Unix . The port was originally done by the University of Wollongong in New South Wales , Australia , and was the first UNIX port to hardware other than the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP family. By 1982, the Wollongong Group Edition 7 Unix and Programmer's Workbench (PWB) were available on models such as

8000-641: The company announced it would acquire the Indian in vitro diagnostic company, Tulip Diagnostics. In May 2017, the company acquired Euroimmun Medical Laboratory Diagnostics for approximately US$ 1.3 billion. In 2018, the company acquired Australian biotech company , RHS Ltd., Chinese manufacturer of analytical instruments, Shanghai Spectrum Instruments Co. Ltd., and France -based company Cisbio Bioassays, which specializes in diagnostics and drug discovery solutions. In November 2020, PerkinElmer announced it would acquire Horizon Discovery Group for around US$ 383 million. In March 2021, PerkinElmer announced that

8125-505: The company began trading shares over the counter . The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 13 December 1960. Perkin remained as president and CEO until June 1961, when Robert Lewis, previously of Argus Camera and Sylvania Electric Products , took over these roles. Perkin remained the chairman of the board until his death in 1969. In 1967, the U.S. Air Force asked Perkin-Elmer to produce an all-optical "masking" system for semiconductor fabrication . Previous systems used

8250-500: The company has completed its acquisition of Oxford Immunotec Global PLC (Oxford Immunotec). In May of the same year, the business announced it would purchase Nexcelom Bioscience for $ 260 million and Immunodiagnostic Systems Holdings PLC for $ 155 million. In June the company announced it would acquire SIRION Biotech, a specialist in viral vector gene delivery methods. In July the business announced it would acquire BioLegend for $ 5.25 billion. Perkin-Elmer's Danbury Optical System unit

8375-516: The company up for a public stock sale. This was done one in February 1986, with Perkin-Elmer retaining an 82 percent stake in Concurrent. In 1988, there was a merger between Concurrent Computer Corporation and MASSCOMP ; as part of the deal, Perkin-Elmer's share in Concurrent was bought out. At that point, Perkin-Elmer said they had culminated their multi-year process of exiting from computer market, allowing them to focus on their primary business segments. Modern PerkinElmer traces its history back to

8500-413: The core of the solar flare phenomena. The primary scientific objective of RHESSI was to understand the following processes that take place in the magnetized plasmas of the solar atmosphere during a flare: These high-energy processes play a major role at sites throughout the Universe ranging from magnetospheres to active galaxies . Consequently, the importance of understanding these processes transcends

8625-499: The end of the 1960s and installed James E. Webb as NASA administrator to achieve this goal. On May   25, 1961, President Kennedy openly declared this goal in his "Urgent National Needs" speech to the United States Congress, declaring: I believe this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for

8750-400: The field of solar physics ; it is one of the major goals of space physics and astrophysics . The high energy processes of interest include the following: These processes involve: It is impossible to duplicate these conditions in laboratories on the Earth . The acceleration of electrons is revealed by hard X-ray and gamma-ray bremsstrahlung while the acceleration of protons and ions

8875-420: The first close up view of the planet. Both probes became the first objects to leave the Solar System. The Voyager program launched in 1977, conducting flybys of Jupiter and Saturn , Neptune , and Uranus on a trajectory to leave the Solar System. The Galileo spacecraft, deployed from the Space Shuttle flight STS-34 , was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, discovering evidence of subsurface oceans on

9000-510: The first crew to make it habitable and operational. Skylab hosted nine missions and was decommissioned in 1974 and deorbited in 1979, two years prior to the first launch of the Space Shuttle and any possibility of boosting its orbit. In 1975, the Apollo–Soyuz mission was the first ever international spaceflight and a major diplomatic accomplishment between the Cold War rivals, which also marked

9125-402: The first humans to see the Earth as a globe in space, the first to witness an Earthrise , and the first to see and manually photograph the far side of the Moon. The first lunar landing was conducted by Apollo   11. Commanded by Neil Armstrong with astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins , Apollo   11 was one of the most significant missions in NASA's history, marking the end of

9250-431: The germanium crystal assembly made RHESSI a formidable IPN component. Even when other spacecraft could provide burst locations, few could provide as high-quality spectra of the burst (in both time and energy) as RHESSI. Rarely, however, a GRB occurred near the Sun, in the collimated field of view. The grids then provided full information, and RHESSI was able to provide a fine GRB location even without IPN correlation. RHESSI

9375-595: The ground to construct images of solar flares in different energy bands. The five coarse grids (square) were constructed by Van Beek Consultancy in Netherlands . The four fine grids (round) were constructed by Thermo Electron Tecomet in Massachusetts . All grids were characterized both optically and with X-rays at Goddard Space Flight Center before being shipped to the Paul Scherrer Institute for integration into

9500-514: The growing firm on 13 December 1939. A further move to Glenbrook in Connecticut in 1941 was quickly followed by another move to Norwalk, Connecticut , where the company remained until 2000. The opening of World War II led to significant expansion as the company produced optics for range finders, bombsights, and reconnaissance systems. This work led to the U.S. Navy awarding them the first "E" for Excellence award in 1942. Perkin-Elmer retained

9625-646: The highest profile biotechnology events of the decade, the intense race against the Human Genome Project consortium, which then resulted in the genomics segment of the technology bubble . Perkin-Elmer purchased the Boston operations of NEN Life Sciences in 2001. In 1992, the company merged with Applied Biosystems . In 1997 they merged with PerSeptive Biosystems . On July 14, 1999, the new analytical instruments maker PerkinElmer cut 350 jobs, or 12%, in its cost reduction reorganization. In 2006, PerkinElmer sold off

9750-483: The hypersonic test aircraft becoming the first non-dedicated spacecraft to cross from the atmosphere to outer space. The X-15 also served as a testbed for Apollo program technologies, as well as ramjet and scramjet propulsion. Escalations in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union prompted President John F. Kennedy to charge NASA with landing an American on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by

9875-613: The imaging telescope assembly. The spectrometer contained nine germanium detectors that were positioned behind the nine grid pairs on the telescope. These artificially grown crystals, pure to over one part in a trillion, were manufactured by the ORTEC division of Perkin Elmer Instruments . When they were cooled to cryogenic temperatures and a high voltage was put across them (up to 4000 volts ), they converted incoming X-rays and gamma-rays to pulses of electric current. The amount of current

10000-451: The last flight of the Apollo capsule. Flown in 1975, a U.S. Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz capsule. During the 1960s, NASA started its space science and interplanetary probe program. The Mariner program was its flagship program, launching probes to Venus , Mars , and Mercury in the 1960s. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was the lead NASA center for robotic interplanetary exploration, making significant discoveries about

10125-469: The launch of the telescope, paid US$ 10 million. The Justice Department asserted that the companies should have known about the flawed testing. Trade group Aerospace Industries Association protested when concerns were raised in the aerospace industry that aerospace companies might be held liable for failed equipment. Perkin-Elmer built the optical systems for the KH-9 Hexagon series of spy satellites at

10250-484: The long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. Kennedy gave his " We choose to go to the Moon " speech the next year, on September   12, 1962 at Rice University , where he addressed the nation hoping to reinforce public support for the Apollo program. Despite attacks on the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon from the former president Dwight Eisenhower and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater , President Kennedy

10375-434: The majority of the International Space Station, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency all contributed components. Despite NASA's insistence that costs would be kept at a budget of $ 17.4, they kept rising and NASA had to transfer funds from other programs to keep the International Space Station solvent. Ultimately, the total cost of the station was $ 150 billion, with the United States paying for two-thirds.Following

10500-542: The military. The Mercury 7 astronauts included three Air Force pilots, three Navy aviators, and one Marine Corps pilot. On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to enter space, performing a suborbital spaceflight in the Freedom 7 . This flight occurred less than a month after the Soviet Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, executing a full orbital spaceflight. NASA's first orbital spaceflight

10625-609: The moon of Enceladus , which could harbor life. Finally launched in 2006, the New Horizons mission was the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and the Kuiper Belt . Beyond interplanetary probes, NASA has launched many space telescopes . Launched in the 1960s, the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory were NASA's first orbital telescopes, providing ultraviolet, gamma-ray, x-ray, and infrared observations. NASA launched

10750-471: The next forty years, NACA would conduct aeronautical research in support of the U.S. Air Force , U.S. Army , U.S. Navy , and the civil aviation sector. After the end of World War II , NACA became interested in the possibilities of guided missiles and supersonic aircraft, developing and testing the Bell X-1 in a joint program with the U.S. Air Force . NACA's interest in space grew out of its rocketry program at

10875-498: The number of working chips from perhaps 10% to 70% overnight. Chip prices plummeted as a result, with examples like the MOS 6502 selling for about US$ 20 while the previous generation of designs like the Motorola 6800 sold for around US$ 250. The Micralign was so successful that Perkin-Elmer became the largest single vendor in the chip space in three years. In spite of this success, the company

11000-457: The primary mirror's surface discrepancies, but the company chose to withhold that data from NASA. A NASA investigation heavily criticized Perkin-Elmer for management failings, disregarding written quality guidelines, and ignoring test data that revealed the miscalibration. Corrective optics were installed on the telescope during the first Hubble service and repair mission STS-61 . The correction, Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement ,

11125-669: The property of Evotec , the former owner company. PerkinElmer had a license to use the brand until the end of year 2007. PerkinElmer has continued to expand its interest in medicine with the acquisitions of clinical laboratories, In July 2006, it acquired NTD Labs located on Long Island , New York . The laboratory specializes in prenatal screening during the first trimester of pregnancy. In 2007, it purchased ViaCell, Inc. for US$ 300 million, which included its offices in Boston and cord blood storage facility in Kentucky near Cincinnati . The company

11250-558: The radiation levels on Mars were equal to those on the International Space Station , greatly increasing the possibility of Human exploration, and observed the key chemical ingredients for life to occur. In 2013, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution ( MAVEN ) mission observed the Martian upper atmosphere and space environment and in 2018, the Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy, and Heat Transport ( InSight ) studied

11375-416: The rotation axis of the tube pointing at the Sun. The tube rotated about its axis as the spacecraft spun at a rate of 15 rpm . During a rotation, a photon from any point on the Sun could either pass through a grid-pair or be blocked by one or other of the grids. This caused a modulation of the intensity of photons emanating from that point. The depth of modulation was zero for the photons arriving exactly along

11500-502: The satellites were repaired and relaunched. Despite ushering in a new era of spaceflight, where NASA was contracting launch services to commercial companies, the Space Shuttle was criticized for not being as reusable and cost-effective as advertised. In 1986, Challenger disaster on the STS-51L mission resulted in the loss of the spacecraft and all seven astronauts on launch, grounding the entire space shuttle fleet for 36 months and forced

11625-641: The separation of dark and regular matter during galactic collisions. Finally, the Spitzer Space Telescope is an infrared telescope launched in 2003 from a Delta II rocket. It is in a trailing orbit around the Sun, following the Earth and discovered the existence of brown dwarf stars . Other telescopes, such as the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe , provided evidence to support

11750-552: The setback caused by the Apollo   1 fire, which killed three astronauts, the program proceeded. Apollo   8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon . The crew orbited the Moon ten times on December   24 and   25, 1968, and then traveled safely back to Earth . The three Apollo   8 astronauts— Frank Borman , James Lovell , and William Anders —were

11875-571: The space agency where he would serve as the director of the Apollo program. Development of the Saturn   V rocket was led by Wernher von Braun and his team at the Marshall Space Flight Center , derived from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's original Saturn   I . The Apollo spacecraft was designed and built by North American Aviation , while the Apollo Lunar Module was designed and built by Grumman . To develop

12000-534: The space shuttle be retired. In 2006, the Space Shuttle returned to flight, conducting several mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope , but was retired following the STS-135 resupply mission to the International Space Station in 2011. NASA never gave up on the idea of a space station after Skylab's reentry in 1979. The agency began lobbying politicians to support building a larger space station as soon as

12125-476: The space station spelled an end to the program. In 2003, a second space shuttle was destroyed when the Columbia was destroyed upon reentry during the STS-107 mission, resulting in the loss of the spacecraft and all seven astronauts. This accident marked the beginning of the retiring of the Space Shuttle program, with President George W. Bush directing that upon the completion of the International Space Station,

12250-533: The spacecraft rotated, these grids blocked and unblocked any X-rays which may have come from the Sun modulating the photon signal in time. The modulation could be measured with a detector having no spatial resolution placed behind the RMC since the spatial information was now stored in the time domain. The modulation pattern over half a rotation for a single RMC provided the amplitude and phase of many spatial Fourier components over

12375-409: The spacecraft structure, and impacted the detectors from any angle. This mode was used to observe gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The incoming gamma rays were not modulated by the grids, so positional and imaging information was not recorded. However, a crude position could still be derived by the fact that the detectors had front and rear pickups. Also, the detectors near the burst shielded the ones away from

12500-462: The spaceflight skills and equipment required for a lunar mission, NASA initiated Project Gemini . Using a modified Air Force Titan   II launch vehicle, the Gemini capsule could hold two astronauts for flights of over two weeks. Gemini pioneered the use of fuel cells instead of batteries, and conducted the first American spacewalks and rendezvous operations . The Ranger Program was started in

12625-400: The spin axis and gradually increases to the off-axis photons. Behind each grid-pair was a cryogenic (75 K) germanium detector of 7.1 cm diameter and 8.5 cm (3.3 in) thickness. The output from each of the nine detectors, at any given energy, could be Fourier-analyzed to provide a full two-dimensional spatial spectrum of an extended source region on the Sun. The full spatial spectrum

12750-435: The structure and mechanisms, the power system (including the battery , solar panels , and control electronics), the attitude control system , thermal control system , command and data handling system (C&DH), and telecommunications system. The spacecraft structure provided support for the telescope and other components. It was manufactured out of aluminum parts to be light weight but strong. The equipment platform had

12875-403: The telescope tube. It maintained the separation and alignment of the trays. Nine grids were mounted on a grid tray at each end of the telescope tube. The grid pairs modulated the transmission of solar flare X-ray and gamma ray emissions through to the detectors as the spacecraft spins around the axis of the telescope tube. The modulated count rates in the nine detectors were used in computers on

13000-427: The various projects, mission architectures and associated timelines relevant to lunar and Mars exploration and science. PerkinElmer Over its history, PerkinElmer has been split in two twice. In 1999, PerkinElmer merged with EG&G , with the ongoing Analytical Instruments Division of Perkin-Elmer keeping that name, while the life sciences division of the company became the separate PE Corporation . In 2022,

13125-454: Was Venus , sharing many similar characteristics to Earth. First visited by American Mariner 2 spacecraft, Venus was observed to be a hot and inhospitable planet. Follow-on missions included the Pioneer Venus project in the 1970s and Magellan , which performed radar mapping of Venus' surface in the 1980s and 1990s. Future missions were flybys of Venus, on their way to other destinations in

13250-418: Was 1955's Transverse Panoramic Camera, which took images on 12 by 14 ft (3.7 by 4.3 m) wide frames that provided single-frame images from horizon to horizon from an aircraft flying at 40,000 ft altitude. Such systems remained a major part of the company's income, capped by the installation of laser retroreflectors on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Elmer died at age 83 in 1954, and

13375-663: Was able to previously accomplish. NASA launched its first commercial satellites on the STS-5 mission and in 1984, the STS-41-C mission conducted the world's first on-orbit satellite servicing mission when the Challenger captured and repaired the malfunctioning Solar Maximum Mission satellite. It also had the capability to return malfunctioning satellite to Earth, like it did with the Palapa B2 and Westar 6 satellites. Once returned to Earth,

13500-477: Was able to protect NASA's growing budget, of which 50% went directly to human spaceflight and it was later estimated that, at its height, 5% of Americans worked on some aspect of the Apollo program. Mirroring the Department of Defense's program management concept using redundant systems in building the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, NASA requested the Air Force assign Major General Samuel C. Phillips to

13625-531: Was also a concern with sharing sensitive space technologies with the Europeans, which had the potential to dilute America's technical lead. Ultimately, an international agreement to develop the Space Station Freedom program would be signed with thirteen countries in 1985, including the European Space Agency member states, Canada , and Japan . Despite its status as the first international space program,

13750-591: Was applied entirely to the secondary mirror and replaced existing instrumentation; the aberration of the primary mirror remained uncorrected. The company agreed to pay US$ 15 million, essentially forgoing its fees in polishing the mirror, to avoid a threatened liability lawsuit under the False Claims Act by the Federal government. Hughes Aircraft , which acquired the Danbury Optical System unit one month after

13875-606: Was attending the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study chemical engineering , but left after a year to try his hand on Wall Street . Still interested in the sciences, he gave public lectures on various topics. Charles Elmer ran a firm that supplied court reporters and was nearing retirement when he attended one of Perkin's lectures on astronomy being held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences . The two struck up

14000-469: Was commissioned to build the optical components of the Hubble Space Telescope . The construction of the main mirror began in 1979 and completed in 1981. The polishing process ran over budget and behind schedule, producing significant friction with NASA . Due to a miscalibrated null corrector , the primary mirror was also found to have a significant spherical aberration after reaching orbit on STS-31 . Perkin-Elmer's own calculations and measurements revealed

14125-588: Was conducted by John Glenn on February 20, 1962, in the Friendship 7 , making three full orbits before reentering. Glenn had to fly parts of his final two orbits manually due to an autopilot malfunction. The sixth and final Mercury mission was flown by Gordon Cooper in May 1963, performing 22 orbits over 34 hours in the Faith 7 . The Mercury Program was wildly recognized as a resounding success, achieving its objectives to orbit

14250-415: Was decommissioned on 16 August 2018 and remained in a stable low Earth orbit which gradually decayed due to atmospheric drag. NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA / ˈ n æ s ə / ) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civil space program , aeronautics research, and space research. Established in 1958 , it succeeded

14375-547: Was designed to image solar flares in energetic photons from soft X-rays (~3 keV ) to gamma rays (up to ~20 MeV) and to provide high resolution spectroscopy up to gamma-ray energies of ~20 MeV. Furthermore, it had the capability to perform spatially resolved spectroscopy with high spectral resolution. Researchers believe that much of the energy released during a flare is used to accelerate, to very high energies, electrons (emitting primarily X-rays) and protons and other ions (emitting primarily gamma rays). The new approach of

14500-450: Was formed through the purchase of Interdata, Inc. , an independent computer manufacturer, in 1973–1974 for some US$ 63 million. This merger made Perkin-Elmer's annual sales rise to over US$ 200 million. This was also known as Perkin-Elmer's Data Systems Group. The 32-bit computers were very similar to an IBM System/370, but ran the OS/32MT operating system. The Computer Systems Division had

14625-522: Was intended to image at high resolution solar flares in X-rays and gamma rays. The X-rays and gamma rays covered an energy range of 3 keV-20 MeV with an energy resolution of about 1 keV and a spatial resolution of just a few seconds of arc. The imaging was accomplished by a 45 × 170 cm (18 × 67 in) tube containing nine pairs (one behind the other, spaced 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) apart) of tungsten or molybdenum wire grids of width 9 cm (3.5 in) mounted parallel to

14750-435: Was largely a has-been by the 1980s due to their late response to the introduction of the stepping aligner , which allowed a single small mask to be stepped across the wafer, rather than requiring a single large mask covering the entire wafer. The company never regained their lead, and sold the division to The Silicon Valley Group. In the early 1990s, partnered with Cetus Corporation (and later Hoffmann-La Roche ) to pioneer

14875-492: Was launched in 1990 on STS-31 from the Discovery and could view galaxies 15 billion light years away. A major defect in the telescope's mirror could have crippled the program, had NASA not used computer enhancement to compensate for the imperfection and launched five Space Shuttle servicing flights to replace the damaged components. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was launched from the Atlantis on STS-37 in 1991, discovering

15000-473: Was possible because each wire grid pair had a different slit width, spacing and wire thickness. Data accumulation was about 16 Gb during a 10-minutes rotation. The telemetry data was collected at Berkeley (California), Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), Virginia , Santiago , Chile and Weilheim, Germany . Science analysis of the data involved close collaboration with many dedictated ground based and satellite based solar observatories. A secondary goal of RHESSI

15125-641: Was proportional to the energy of the photon, and was measured by sensitive electronics designed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Space Sciences Laboratory , at Berkeley, California. The detectors were cooled with an electromechanical Stirling-cycle cryocooler built by SunPower Inc. , and flight qualified at Goddard Space Flight Center. It maintained them at the required operating temperature of −198 °C (−324.4 °F), or 75° above absolute zero ). RHESSI

15250-583: Was renamed ViaCord. In 2001 Perkin Elmer acquired Packard Bioscience Inc from its majority shareholder, Dick McKernen. This acquisition also came with Agincourt Technologies Inc and consolidated Perkin Elmer's position in laboratory robotics, in particular, liquid handling robots which were to prove essential for the high-throughput sequencing needed for the Human Genome Project. In March 2008, PerkinElmer purchased Pediatrix Screening (formerly Neo Gen Screening),

15375-457: Was renamed to RHESSI on 29 March 2002 in honor of Dr. Reuven Ramaty , a pioneer in the area of high energy solar physics. RHESSI was the first space mission named after a NASA scientist. RHESSI was built by Spectrum Astro for Goddard Space Flight Center and was operated by the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, California . The principal investigator from 2002 to 2012 was Robert Lin , who

15500-403: Was succeeded by Säm Krucker. The entire spacecraft rotated to provide the necessary signal modulation. The four, fixed solar panels were designed to provide enough gyroscopic moment to stabilize rotation about the solar vector. This largely eliminated the need for attitude control . The instrument detectors were nine high-purity germanium crystals. Each was cooled to cryogenic temperatures by

15625-619: Was to observe astronomical sources such as Crab Nebula . RHESSI observations changed our perspective on solar flares, particularly on high-energy processes in flares. Its observations led to numerous publications in scientific journals and presentations at conferences. Through 2017, the satellite was referenced in 2,474 publications, books, and presentations. The collection "High-Energy Aspects of Solar Flares: A RHESSI Inspired Monograph" contains reviews of RHESSI solar flare research up to 2011. Following communication difficulties, RHESSI ceased science operations on 11 April 2018 at 01:50 UTC . It

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