MSSTA

The Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array (MSSTA) was a sounding rocket payload built by Professor Arthur 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.

[1] MSSTA contained a large number of individual telescopes (> 10), all trained on the Sun and all sensitive to slightly different wavelengths of ultraviolet light.

MSSTA used film instead of a CCD in order to achieve the highest possible spatial resolution and to avoid the electronics difficulty presented by the large number of detectors that would have been required for its many telescopes.

[3] While Walker's 1991 telescope was the first in the series to carry the MSSTA moniker, the precursor to the MSSTA, the Stanford/MSFC Rocket Spectroheliograph (NASA Sounding Rocket flight 27.092), which carried two EUV telescopes in 1987, was the first mission to successfully obtain high-resolution, full-disk solar images utilizing normal incidence EUV optics.

These include those earned by Joakim Lindblom, Maxwell J. Allen, Ray H. O'Neal, Craig Edward DeForest, Charles C. Kankelborg, Hakeem Oluseyi, Dennis S. Martinez-Galarce, and Paul F.X.

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.