Recent results from the spare low temperature Astro-E microcalorimeter used at the LLNL EBIT-I and EBIT-II

In the past year a spare NASA/GSFC Astro-E microcalorimeter has been installed, tested, and run successfully on the electron beam ions traps EBIT-I and EBIT-II at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The microcalorimeter complements crystal and grating spectrometers already part of the LLNL ebit program making it possible to measure a broad bandwidth (∼0.3–10 keV) with moderate resolution while simultaneously measuring a narrow bandwidth (∼0.7–1.3 keV) with high resolution. An overview of recent work is presented including measurements by the microcalorimeter of absolute excitation cross sections. These results continue our effort to provide atomic data of high quality to be used as benchmarks for theoretical calculations and to be included in atomic data bases employed by spectral fitting packages used to interpret spectra obtained by XMM-Newton and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.