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S.M. Kahn (Columbia University (for the RGS consortium)
The Reflection Grating Spectrometer on XMM-Newton is comprised of arrays of reflection gratings mounted at grazing incidence to the beam at immediately behind two of the three telescopes which are carried on board the satellite. The grating arrays pick off half the light exiting the telescopes and disperse it to dedicated strips of CCD detectors which read out the X-ray spectrum. The spectrometer operates over the band 6 - 35 Angstroms and achieves a resolving power ranging from 200 - 700. Since the detector doors were opened in late January, the instrument has been working perfectly with the exception of the loss of one of nine CCDs on one of the two identical units. The measured resolution and effective area appear to be very close to prelaunch predictions. I will present spectra of several targets observed during the "commissioning" phase. These include the RS CVn system, HR 1099, the bright X-ray transient source, EXO 0748-676, and the pulsar PSR 0540-69.