"First Light" Nustar

On June 28, 2012, the space X -ray telescope Nustar (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) saw the “first light”. “Honor” to be the first object, the picture of which will be made by the new apparatus was awarded the swan X-1, historically the first candidate for black holes.

The X-1 swan was seen in an X-ray with unprecedented clarity. In the illustration of the NASA (JPL) reactive traffic laboratory, the difference between the images of the object obtained before the launch of Nustar and the new “pictures” is clearly noticeable.

The Nustar device is a very modest project. For the first time he was spoke about him in 2003, two years later he was included in the SMEX program. Not in the sense - funny projects, but “Small Research” - Small Exploration. Again, “small” - not in the sense of small, but not very expensive - up to $ 120 million per project. True, in the end, Nustar “crawled out” for this estimate and “pulled” all 180 million.

The main goals of the telescope are neutron stars and black holes, as well as X -ray radiation of our Sun.

The story with Nustar stretched for a long time, the project was at least twice frozen, and the launch took place only on June 13, 2012. Moreover, Nustar started non -trivial - from the plane. The PEGASUS launch vehicle launched from the Stargazer aircraft brought a telescope into a near-earth orbit about 550 km high.

On the apparatus with a modest mass of only 370 kg, a Binocular X -ray telescope was installed, made according to the scheme developed in 1952 by the German Hans Voltaire (though Voltaire himself made it for X -bearing microscopes). Detectors are sensitive to hard x -ray radiation, they work in the energy area from 6 to 79 KEV.

But the focal length of the telescope is huge: 10 meters. This was achieved by attributing the focusing optics on a ten-meter farm (which many news agencies for some reason called “antenna”) from detectors.

Due to this, an angular resolution is achieved by an order of magnitude better than that of all other x -ray telescopes. Which is confirmed by the first pictures received.

Alexey Paevsky