Best of both worlds: Fusing hyperspectral data from two generations of spectro-imagers for X-ray astrophysics

Abstract

With the launch of the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the advent of microcalorimeter detectors, X-ray astrophysics is entering in a new era of spatially resolved high resolution spectroscopy. But while this new generation of X-ray telescopes have much finer spectral resolutions than their predecessors (e.g. XMM-Newton, Chandra), they also have coarser spatial resolutions, leading to problematic cross-pixel contamination. This issue is currently a critical limitation for the study of extended sources such as galaxy clusters or supernova remnants. To increase the scientific output of XRISM's hyperspectral data, we propose to fuse it with XMM-Newton data, and seek to obtain a cube with the best spatial and spectral resolution of both generations. This is the aim of hyperspectral fusion. In this article, we have implemented an algorithm that jointly deconvolves the spatial response of XRISM and the spectral response of XMM-Newton. To do so, we construct a forward model adapted for instrumental systematic degradations and Poisson noise, then tackle hyperspectral fusion as a regularized inverse problem. We test three methods of regularization: low rank approximation with Sobolev regularization; low rank approximation with 2D wavelet sparsity ; and 2D-1D wavelet sparsity. We test our method on toy models constructed from hydrodynamic simulations of supernova remnants. We find that our method reconstructs the ground truth well even when the toy model is complex. For the regularization term, we find that while the low rank approximation worked well as a spectral denoiser in models with less spectral variability, it introduced a bias in models with more spectral variability, in which case the 2D-1D wavelet sparsity regularization worked best. After demonstrating a proof of concept in this article, we aim to apply this method to real X-ray astrophysical data in the near future.