After a hard earned break in the Channel Isles, I return to bring you more interest in Astronomy and Space. This news story took my interest today with NASA again pushing black hole research onto the table. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) being developed as a joint venture between a number of contributors including NASA's JPL, CalTech and the Danish National Space Centre. The telescope, due to be launched in 2011, is seen as an additional explorer mission wedged between the 2009 launch of of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the 2013 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft will map areas of the sky in the light of high-energy X-rays and complement astrophysics missions that explore the cosmos in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
NuSTAR It is part of NASA's Small Explorer class of missions, which have a cost cap of $105 million, not including launch costs. In 2006 NASA canceled this mission due to funding diversions created by the re-emphasis on Lunar exploration but have now re-commissioned the project. The mission will make detailed observations of the matter around black holes, which may help explain the origin of the powerful jets that spew from many of them. The mission will also investigate the debris left behind by ancient supernova explosions and will scrutinise the X-ray afterglow of gamma-ray bursts, thought to signal the collapse of massive stars and collisions between neutron stars. A preliminary design for the mission was completed before the 2006 cancellation, but a more detailed one will need to be carried out before construction of the satellite can begin in preparation for the 2011 launch.
The NuSTAR instrument consists of an array of three co-aligned hard X-ray telescopes. The grazing incidence mirrors focus onto three shielded solid-state pixel detectors, separated by a mast that extends the focal length to 10m after launch. A laser metrology system monitors the mast alignment. The optics utilize thin glass shells coated with depth-graded multi-layers to extend the bandpass and FOV over that achievable with standard metal surfaces. Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CdZnTe) detectors provide excellent spectral resolution and high quantum efficiency without requiring cryogenic operation. The following graphic shows the energy spectrum that NuSTAR will operate at which can be seen to be an expansion of the XMM, Chandra and Astro-E2 telescopes.
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