Launch of NASA's NuSTAR Mission Postponed

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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George Diller 321-861-7643
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
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News release: 2012-076 March 16, 2012

Launch of NASA's NuSTAR Mission Postponed

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-076&cid=release_2012-076

PASADENA, Calif. -- The planned launch of NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array
(NuSTAR) mission has been postponed after a March 15 launch status meeting. The launch will
be rescheduled to allow additional time to confirm the flight software used by the launch
vehicle's flight computer will issue commands to the rocket as intended.

The spacecraft will lift off on an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket, which will be released
from an aircraft taking off from the Reagan Test Site on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall
Islands. The time required to complete the software review has moved NuSTAR beyond the
March timeframe currently available on the range at Kwajalein. In the interim, NASA will
coordinate with the launch site to determine the earliest possible launch opportunity. This is
expected to be within the next two months.

NuSTAR will use advanced optics and detectors, allowing astronomers to observe the high-
energy X-ray sky with much greater sensitivity and clarity than any mission flown before. The
mission will advance our understanding of how structures in the universe form and evolve. It will
observe some of the hottest, densest and most energetic objects in the universe, including black
holes, their high-speed particle jets, ultra-dense neutron stars, supernova remnants and our sun.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology and managed
by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument
was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley;
Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the
Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif.; and
ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif. NuSTAR will be operated by UC Berkeley, with the
Italian Space Agency providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The
mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Calif. NASA's Explorer
Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/ .

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