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   62092
   Recent studies of mosaics of ROSAT PSPC pointed observations have
   detected 0.5 to 2.0 keV X-ray shadows in the diffuse X-ray background
   (DXB) cast by distant molecular gas in the Galactic plane. The results
   imply that the observed DXB in the Galactic plane consists of multiple
   components of Galactic hot gas. The poor spectral capability of the
   ROSAT PSPC, however, restricted the spectral study of these Galactic
   DXB components. We, thus, propose ASCA observations for an extensive
   spectral study of the DXB in the Galactic plane. This program will, for
   the first time, reveal detailed spectral properties of the DXB
   component which is distributed up to ~3 kpc along the line of sight in
   the Galactic plane by improving statistics by an order of magnitude
   than was possible with ROSAT data.
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