NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array or NuSTAR is being prepared for the final journey to its launch pad on Kwajalein Atoll in the Central Pacific Ocean. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 13. The mission will study everything from massive black holes to our own sun.
“We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a fundamentally new high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much deeper and crisper images than before” said Fiona Harrison.
After taking off on launch day the Stargazer will drop the rocket around 8.30 am PDT (11.30 am EDT). The rocket will then ignite and carry NuSTAR to a low orbit around Earth.
“We’re all really excited to see the fruition of our work begin its mission in space” said Yunjin Kim, the project manager for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena Calif.
NuSTAR will be the first space telescope to create focused images of cosmic X-rays with the highest energies. The telescope will have more than 10 times the resolution and more than 100 times the sensitivity of its predecessors while operating in a similar energy range.
The mission will work with other telescopes in space and provides a more complete picture of the most energetic and exotic objects in space such as black holes, dead stars and jets traveling near the speed of the light.
The result of these modest investments is a small space telescope that will provide world-class science in an important but relatively unexplored band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
NuSTAR will study black holes that are big and small, far and near, answering questions about the formation and physics behind these wonders of the cosmos. The observatory will investigate how exploding stars forge the elements that make up the planets and will even study our own sun’s atmosphere.
The mission’s outreach program is based at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif.
Keywords – Rohnert Park, Sonoma State University, NuSTAR, mission, launch pad.
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