The nuclear spectroscopic telescope array (NuSTAR) high-energy X-ray mission
Creators
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Madsen, Kristin K.
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Harrison, Fiona A.
- An, Hongjun
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Boggs, Steven E.
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Christensen, Finn E.
- Cook, Rick
- Craig, William W.
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Forster, Karl
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Fuerst, Felix
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Grefenstette, Brian
- Hailey, Charles J.
- Kitaguchi, Takao
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Markwardt, Craig
- Mao, Peter
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Miyasaka, Hiromasa
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Rana, Vikram
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Stern, Daniel K.
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Zhang, William W.
- Zoglauer, Andreas
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Walton, Dominic
- Westergaard, Niels J.
Contributors
Abstract
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission was launched on 2012 June 13 and is the first focusing high-energy X-ray telescope in orbit operating above ~10 keV. NuSTAR flies two co-aligned Wolter-I conical approximation X-ray optics, coated with Pt/C and W/Si multilayers, and combined with a focal length of 10.14 meters this enables operation from 3-79 keV. The optics focus onto two focal plane arrays, each consisting of 4 CdZnTe pixel detectors, for a field of view of 12.5 arcminutes. The inherently low background associated with concentrating the X-ray light enables NuSTAR to probe the hard X-ray sky with a more than 100-fold improvement in sensitivity, and with an effective point spread function FWHM of 18 arcseconds (HPD ~1), NuSTAR provides a leap of improvement in resolution over the collimated or coded mask instruments that have operated in this bandpass. We present in-orbit performance details of the observatory and highlight important science results from the first two years of the mission.
Additional Information
© 2014 SPIE. This work was supported under NASA Contract No. NNG08FD60C, and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA).Attached Files
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Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 84186
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20180109-101045374
Funding
- NASA
- NNG08FD60C
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
Dates
- Created
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2018-01-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- NuSTAR, Space Radiation Laboratory
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 9144