Update: NuSTAR was successfully launched over the Pacific Ocean at 9聽am Pacific Standard Time on 13 June and is now in low Earth orbit
Original article, posted 12 June 2012:
You don鈥檛 have to be big to hunt black holes. NASA鈥檚 telescope , which was due to take off from an island in the South Pacific on 13 June, is small enough to , even including its launch rocket. Once in orbit, it will .
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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will be the first telescope to bring high-energy X-rays into focus, letting astronomers map and study the extreme physics around black holes and the explosions of massive stars. Its images of these objects will be 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than those of previous telescopes.
To make such sharp images, the telescope needs to focus X-rays with energies of up to 100 kiloelectronvolts 鈥� 10 times as energetic as those sought by previous X-ray telescopes 鈥� onto a small area. Visible light telescopes can manage this with a focusing lens relatively close to the eyepiece. But because the X-rays are so energetic, NuSTAR鈥檚 camera needs to be 10 metres away from the focusing lens.
Ingenious model
NuSTAR is on a tight budget: the whole mission should cost only $170 million. As the team could not afford to launch a 10-metre-long telescope, NuSTAR got scrunched up.
鈥淚t鈥檚 no ordinary-looking telescope,鈥� says NuSTAR鈥檚 principal investigator, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Its 鈥渓ens鈥� is made up of 133 nested shells of fingernail-thin glass. At launch, the cameras will sit right next to the lenses. A week after it settles into orbit, NuSTAR will .
Harrison, who conceived of NuSTAR in the 1990s, thinks the cheap, ingenious scope could be a new model for budget-bedevilled NASA. 鈥淚t shows you can make huge advances with a relatively small mission,鈥� she says.
