2012, Week 26
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)
Presenter: Dr. Fiona Harrison
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech and
Principal Investigator for the NuSTAR Explorer Mission
The new X-ray telescope NuSTAR was launched last week. This mission deploys the first focusing telescopes to image the sky in the high energy X-ray (6 – 79 keV) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Previous orbiting telescopes have not employed true focusing optics, but rather have used coded apertures that have intrinsically high backgrounds and limited sensitivity. The NuSTAR instrument consists of two co-aligned grazing incidence telescopes with specially coated optics and newly developed detectors that extend sensitivity to higher energies as compared to previous missions such as Chandra and XMM. The observatory will provide a combination of sensitivity, spatial, and spectral resolution factors of 10 to 100 improved over previous missions that have operated at these X-ray energies. Dr. Harrison presented “The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)” and here we offer the slides from her illustrated lecture.
Questions and comments can be posted on the discussion thread on Starship Asterisk.
The original PowerPoint slides are available here.
Additional Resources
NuSTAR Home
NASA mission page
NuSTAR blog
Wikipedia entry
NuSTAR news thread
High Energy Astronomy Picture of the Week