MSSTA

Image:MSSTA-launch.jpg
Sounding rocket 36.049, carrying the MSSTA (silvery section at top), on the launch rail at White Sands Missile Range, May 1991. The personnel aboard the crane have just installed an arming plug into the payload to prepare it for launch.

The Multi-spectral solar telescope array, or MSSTA, was a sounding rocket payload built by Professor A.B.C. Walker, Jr. at Stanford University in the 1990s to test EUV/XUV imaging of the Sun using normal incidence EUV-reflective multilayer optics. MSSTA contained 14 individual telescopes, all trained on the Sun and all sensitive to slightly different wavelengths of ultraviolet light. Like all sounding rockets, MSSTA flew for approximately 14 minutes per mission, about 5 minutes of which were in space -- just enough time to test a new technology or yield "first results" science. MSSTA is one of the last solar observing instruments to use photographic film rather than a digital camera system such as a CCD.

MSSTA and its sister rocket, NIXT, were prototypes for normal incidence EUV imaging telescopes that are in use today, such as the EIT instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft, and the TRACE spacecraft. MSSTA flew three times: once in 1991 (NASA Sounding Rocket flight 36.049), once in 1994 (flight 36.091), and once in 2002.

Image:MSSTA-assembly.jpg
The MSSTA payload, May 1991, during pre-launch assembly. Some team members are pictured behind the payload.