Black Hole Hunter Ready To Launch

By Craig Garcia - On June 13th  NASA will launch a brand new space telescope into space and also begin a new era in black hole hunting. The NuSTAR spacecraft (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) will launch from within a Pegasus XL rocket, which will in turn be carried by a L-1011 Stargazer airplane. 

This bad ass telescope isn't your typical optical array, in fact it doesn't see the universe the way you or I may see it... this telescope has X-ray eyes, more specifically Wolter-I optic units. Each of these 'eyes' are made of 133 concentric mirrors shaped from flexible glass, similar to that found in laptop computers, and like human eyes need to be distanced from one another since x-ray telescopes require long focal lengths and NuSTAR achieves this with a 10 meter mast between the units.

At approximately the size of a school bus the NuSTAR will be used to view high energy light from extreme locations such as black holes, supernova explosions, particle jets and dead star remnants. “NuSTAR will provide an unprecedented capability to discover and study some of the most exotic objects in the universe, from the corpses of exploded stars in the Milky Way to supermassive black holes residing in the hearts of distant galaxies,” said Lou Kaluzienski, from NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The NuSTAR telescope is scheduled to take off aboard a L-1011 Stargazer airplane at 11:30 am EDT (1530 GMT) from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Then the rocket will be dropped from the aircraft and then launch the telescope into an orbit around Earth's equator which should provide an excellent view of the cosmos and minimize the inferring background light. 

All in all a very exciting prospect, and I look forward to seeing some of the results from this new space based observatory. For more information about the launch you can check out NASA's website or check back here often for updates as they become available.