HEADNEWS: THE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER OF THE HIGH ENERGY ASTROPHYSICS DIVISION OF THE AAS

Newsletter No. 98, June 2011

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10. Suzaku Mission News - Koji Mukai (NASA GSFC)

The Suzaku satellite and its instruments continue to function well. The
guest observer community has increasingly taken full advantage of the
low background of Suzaku's instruments, in particular for observations
of low surface brightness extended X-ray sources. One notable result,
based on observations of the outskirts of Perseus cluster of galaxies,
resulted in a paper in Science (Simionescu et al. 2011, Science, 331,
1576) and a NASA press release.

We expect this, and other recent, high-quality results based on Suzaku
data to be presented at the "Exploring the X-ray Universe: Suzaku and Beyond" conference at SLAC, July 20-22. The abstract deadline has passed, but further meeting details can be found at:
http://www.confcon.com/suzaku2011/abstracts

The results of Cycle 6 proposal selections were announced in March, and
observations began in April. Due to the tight funding situation in
the US, this marks the last official participation of NASA in the Suzaku
guest observer program. However, US-based researchers will still be able
to propose in future rounds; the details are being worked out.

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