Cooling system for the soft x-ray spectrometer (SXS) onboard ASTRO-H

The Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS) is a cryogenic high resolution X-ray spectrometer onboard the X-ray astronomy satellite ASTRO-H. The detector array is cooled down to 50 mK using a 3-stage adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR). The cooling chain from room temperature to the ADR heat-sink is composed of superfluid liquid He, a 4 He Joule-Thomson cryocooler, and 2-stage Stirling cryocoolers. It is designed to keep 30 L of liquid He for more than 3 years in the nominal case. It is also designed with redundant subsystems throughout from room temperature to the ADR heat-sink, to alleviate failure of a single cryocooler or loss of liquid He.