Research activities under the CPSS fall within three basic categories: 

1) analysis and interpretation of data obtained from competitive guest investigator awards, from observations utilizing operational satellites, and from archival data;

2) the development of flight hardware for future missions, and 

3) theoretical and/or modeling investigations related to Space Science.  A few recent activities within these three research categories include:

• Guest investigator awards funded under the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) mission have enabled three promising research investigations related to Eta Carinae, to a new class of rapidly spinning pulsar, and to low mass x-ray binaries.

• Projects related to new flight hardware and software systems are assisting the development of a number of future satellite missions included in the Office of Space Science’s strategic plan, e.g., the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), Constellation-X, and the Orbiting Wide-angle Light-collectors (OWL), as well as balloon borne experiments such as the Isotope Magnet Experiment (ISOMAX).

• Thin foil grazing incidence mirror technology development work is helping to improve performance on future-generation x-ray telescopes.Models on the emergent spectra from accreting black holes, application of a non-linear shock acceleration model to supernova remnants, and the interpretation of heavy element abundances found in gamma-ray emission from solar flares, are promising investigations that are pushing the boundaries of current astrophysical theory and models.