The Lunar Environment Heliophysics X-ray Imager (LEXI) Mission

The Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) is a wide field-of-view soft X-ray telescope developed to study solar wind-magnetosphere coupling. LEXI is part of the Blue Ghost 1 mission comprised of 10 payloads to be deployed on the lunar surface. LEXI monitors the dayside magnetopause position and shape as a function of time by observing soft X-rays (0.1-2 keV) emitted from solar wind charge-exchange between exospheric neutrals and high charge-state solar wind plasma in the dayside magnetosheath. Measurements of the shape and position of the magnetopause are used to test temporal models of meso- and macro-scale magnetic reconnection. To image the boundary, LEXI employs lobster-eye optics to focus X-rays to a microchannel plate detector with a 9.1<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mmultiscripts><mml:mo>×</mml:mo><mml:mprescripts></mml:mprescripts><mml:none></mml:none><mml:mo>∘</mml:mo></mml:mmultiscripts><mml:msup><mml:mn>9.1</mml:mn><mml:mo>∘</mml:mo></mml:msup></mml:math> field of view.