On 2006 May 24 NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) 13 satellite was launched with the
next generation Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) aboard. This instrument represents a significant step forward in performance
over the previous SXI flown on GOES-12, even before that instrument suffered serious degradation. Like the previous
instrument, the new instrument uses a grazing incidence optical design, but with a new detector and other improvements,
it has about 10 times the sensitivity, twice the spatial resolution, and greatly reduced wide-angle scattering compared to
the GOES-12 SXI. The GOES-13 SXI completed its 6 month checkout period in December 2006. Performance tests
included dark current, flat-field, spatial response, scattered light, pointing stability and jitter. We present initial analyses
and results of these tests as well as comparisons to ground test results. In addition, GOES-13 solar observations are
compared to solar observations by other instruments. When it enters operations, the GOES-13 SXI will provide
continuous, real-time observations of the X-ray Sun at 1-minute cadence.
|