A Systematic Study of Inverting Overlappograms: MaGIXS—A Case Study

Abstract Slitless (or wide-field) imaging spectroscopy provides simultaneous imaging and spectral information from a wide field of view, allowing for rapid spectroscopic data collection from extended sources. Depending on the size of the extended source, combined with the spatial resolution and spectral dispersion of the instrument, there may be locations in the focal plane where spectral lines from different spatial locations overlap on the detector. An unfolding method is successfully developed and demonstrated on the recent rocket flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer, which observed several strong emission lines in the 8–30 Å wavelength range from two X-ray bright points and a portion of an active region. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of the parameters that control and optimize the inversion method for unfolding slitless spectrograph data.