Final countdown for NASA's NuSTAR X-ray black hole telescope
NASA hopes for local supernovas to study soon
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NASA has confirmed that it is good to go with the delayed launch of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) on June 13, and expects to begin spying out the supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies within a month.
The $170m telescope will create the first accurate census of the "local" black hole population and one of the first targets will be Sagittarius A* at the heart of our own Milky Way. The telescope uses two racks of 133 mirrors with over 200 layers of atom-thick coatings to collect high energy X-rays from its station in Earth orbit to build up its picture of the heavens.
The coatings for NuSTAR took 15 years of development
"NuStar will open a whole new window on the universe; the very first telescope to focus on such high energy X-rays. It will make images that are 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than any telescope that has operated in this region of the spectrum," said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator for NuSTAR, in a press conference.
At the center of each black hole is the event horizon where matter is sucked in, and NuSTAR will focus on the behavior of matter in such an extreme environment, she explained, as well as showing how fast the black hole is spinning. Einstein predicted that the effects of the event horizon would bend light and matter is accelerated to respectable fractions of the speed of light in such circumstances.
NASA already has the CHANDRA platform in orbit monitoring lower level X-ray emissions, but the new addition will focus our image enough for a valid estimate of the number of nearby black holes up to the galactic center. NASA published its expected before and hoped-for after pictures of black hole scans, but let's not forget Hubble's early troubles.
The improvement in focus should allow a detailed black hole map
As well as surveying black holes up to the galactic center, NuSTAR is also looking to investigate supernovae, particularly the most recent ones that still retain evidence of what caused the bang. Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said the telescope could act as a "bomb squad" to investigate remaining fragments try and find out what kicked off the event
"Typically a galaxy like the Milky Way has a supernova go off every 30 years or so and it's been about 100 years since we know one went off in our galaxy," he said. "We're really crossing our fingers that a new supernovae will go off in our galaxy and we'll zoom over as fast as we can, be able to focus on it in about 24 hours and then study its earliest moments."
NuStar will be launched on June 13 (with two days flexibility) in a two-stage Pegasus XL rocket slung under an airliner flying at 40,000 feet over Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. This is as close as possible to the Earth's equator in order to minimize the amount of time the rocket spends in the charged particles in Earth's magnetic field during flight.
Once in orbit, the twin receivers will split apart using a 10 meter expandable mast that can focus the X-rays, and then spend three weeks getting calibrated. The mast was invented for use on the Space Shuttle to deploy satellites and developed for this mission on the International Space Station.
NuSTAR under deployment
"The ground is actually the worst place to test something like this, because of gravity," Yunjin Kim, NuSTAR project manager at JPL, told El Reg. The mast was built and deployed 20 times in testing on the ISS, then subject to vibration stresses before being deployed again and he said he was confident it would work to order.
Once data starts coming in it'll be fired down to a ground station in Kenya operated by the Italian space agency and then on to CalTech via the mission operations center in Berkeley. Once it has been checked, NASA will put the results online from its central repository at Goddard so anyone can access it. ®
COMMENTS
Principle Investigator???
I have to wonder what that term means in the context of this experiment because, as others have pointed out above, there seem to be rather a lot of factual or misleading inaccuracies in what she said.
In order of appearance in the article:
"At the center of each black hole is the event horizon..." Umm... at the [debatable] center of a Black Hole (BH) is the singularity. The Event Horizon (EH) isn't, as far as we know, any sort of entity in its own right but is just the distance from the singularity where a number of interesting things happen.
"Einstein predicted that the effects of the event horizon would bend light..." Einstein did not predict that the EH would bend light. He predicted that the presence of matter would bend space-time and that light would appear to bend as it followed a straight path through this bent space-time. The EH, not being something that actually exists in its own right, does not have or cause 'effects'. Rather, the EH is itself an 'effect'.
"NuSTAR is also looking to investigate supernovae, particularly the most recent ones that still retain evidence of what caused the Big Bang" WTF??? This must be a contender for oxymoron of the year. Type 1b, 1c & 2 supernovae require relatively large stars and, because of their size, could not have existed long enough to be relevant to the Big Bang (BB). Type 1a supernovae are believed to involve white dwarf stars and these could conceivably be old enough to be relevant to the BB except that even the very first stars are not thought to have formed until ~400 million years after the BB, well after all the really interesting origin related stuff had been and gone.
At the center of each black hole is the event horizon ...
Nope. The event horizon is the outer perimeter of said black hole. The center is, well, in the center.
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