In-flight Magnetic Field Environment for the Micro-X Sounding Rocket

The Micro-X project is an X-ray sounding rocket payload that had its first flight on July 22, 2018 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The flight’s aim was to operate a Transition Edge Sensor (TES) X-ray microcalorimeter array in space and take a high-resolution, imaged spectrum of the Cassiopeia A (Cas-A) supernova remnant. A failure in the rocket's Attitude Control System caused the payload to experience excessive spinning and not observe its target, Cas-A. The SQUID readout chain lost lock for part of the observation, which indicates that its operational parameters may have been changed by a new environmental factor. In this talk, I will investigate when the readout failed relative to the exposure of magnetic fields; I will present how the trajectory, pointing direction, and rotation of the tumbling payload was used to find the experienced magnetic field by the detector readout and how that impacted performance.