NASA Preparing to Launch its Newest X-Ray Eyes

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
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J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
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News release: 2012-147 May 30, 2012

NASA Preparing to Launch its Newest X-Ray Eyes

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-147&cid=release_2012-147

PASADENA, Calif. -- 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.
The mission will study everything from massive black holes to our own sun. It is scheduled to
launch no earlier than June 13.

"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, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, Calif., who first conceived of the mission 20 years ago.

The observatory is perched atop an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket. If the
mission passes its Flight Readiness Review on June 1, the rocket will be strapped to the bottom
of an aircraft, the L-1011 Stargazer, also operated by Orbital, on June 2. The Stargazer is
scheduled to fly from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California to Kwajalein on June 5 to
6.

After taking off on launch day, the Stargazer will drop the rocket around 8:30 a.m. PDT (11:30
a.m. EDT). The rocket will then ignite and carry NuSTAR to a low orbit around Earth.

"NuSTAR uses several innovations for its unprecedented imaging capability and was made
possible by many partners," said Yunjin Kim, the project manager for the mission at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're all really excited to see the fruition of our work
begin its mission in space."

NuSTAR will be the first space telescope to create focused images of cosmic X-rays with the
highest energies. These are the same types of X-rays that doctors use to see your bones and
airports use to scan your bags. 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 now, including NASA's Chandra X-ray
Observatory, which observes lower-energy X-rays. Together, they will provide 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 light.

"NuSTAR truly demonstrates the value that NASA's research and development programs
provide in advancing the nation's science agenda," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics
Division director. "Taking just over four years from receiving the project go-ahead to launch,
this low-cost Explorer mission will use new mirror and detector technology that was developed
in NASA's basic research program and tested in NASA's scientific ballooning program. 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 also
investigate how exploding stars forge the elements that make up planets and people, and it will
even study our own sun's atmosphere.

The observatory is able to focus the high-energy X-ray light into sharp images because of a
complex, innovative telescope design. High-energy light is difficult to focus because it only
reflects off mirrors when hitting at nearly parallel angles. NuSTAR solves this problem with
nested shells of mirrors. It has the most nested shells ever used in a space telescope: 133 in each
of two optic units. The mirrors were molded from ultra-thin glass similar to that found in laptop
screens and glazed with even thinner layers of reflective coating.

The telescope also consists of state-of-the-art detectors and a lengthy 33-foot (10-meter) mast,
which connects the detectors to the nested mirrors, providing the long distance required to focus
the X-rays. This mast is folded up into a canister small enough to fit atop the Pegasus launch
vehicle. It will unfurl about seven days after launch. About 23 days later, science operations will
begin.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in
Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; University of
California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley); Columbia University in New York; NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; and ATK Aerospace Systems in 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 in Rohnert Park, 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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