The Seventh Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO-7)

The OSO-7 Satellite

OSO-7, like the other Orbiting Solar Observatory missions, was primarily a solar observatory designed to point a battery of UV and X-ray telescopes at the Sun from a platform mounted on a cylindrical wheel. The detectors for observing cosmic X-ray sources were the X-ray proportional counters, built by MIT, the hard X-ray telescope by UC San Diego and the Gamma Ray Monitor by the University of New Hampshire.

Mission Characteristics

Lifetime : 29 September 1971 - 9 July 1974
Energy Range : 1 keV - 10 MeV
Payload :

2 banks of Proportional Counters: 1 - 60 keV, FOV 1° & 3°
Hard X-ray telescope: 7 - 550 keV, FOV 6.5°, effective area ~64 cm²
Gamma ray Monitor: 300 keV - 10 MeV, resolution 7.8% at 662 keV
Science Highlights:

X-ray All-sky survey
Discovery of the 9-day periodicity in Vela X-1 which led to its optical identification as a HMXRB.
Gamma-ray observations of solar flares
Archive: No data available at the HEASARC.
NSSDC (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/) holds the OSO-7 data in their native format.
[About OSO-7] (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/oso7/oso7_about.html) [Gallery] (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/oso7/oso7_images.html) [Publications] (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/oso7/bib/oso7_biblio.html)

Imagine the Universe is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), Dr. Nicholas White (Director), within the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Imagine Team
Project Leader: Dr. Jim Lochner
All material on this site has been created and updated between 1997-2004.