The STIX imaging concept: model for data formation and image reconstruction methods for the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays on-board Solar Orbiter

<p>The Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) on-board Solar Orbiter measures the X-ray photons emitted by thermal and non-thermal electrons via bremsstrahlung mechanisms. STIX modulates the incident radiation by means of 30 sub-collimators that provide information on the complex values of specific Fourier components of the flaring X-ray source. This talk will illustrate this data formation process and explain how this model can be exploited to formulate image reconstruction methods including constrained maximum entropy, multi-scale CLEAN, feature augmentation, and Particle Swarm Optimization for parametric imaging. These methods will be applied against several experimental STIX observations and the reliability of the reconstructed morphologies will be validated by comparison with EUV maps recorded by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on-board the Solar Dynamics Observatory.</p>