NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope Completes 100 Days

NASA's Nuclear spectroscopic Telescope Array or NuSTAR has completed its 100 days journey on Sept 21. NuSTAR is the first telescope designed to focus on high energy, short length X ray lights from some of the most dynamic objects in space like the black holes and supernova remnants.

Having a longest mast of any astronomical telescope NuSTAR's 33 foot flexible structure is a part of the mission's innovative design. This early mission phase is helping the team to learn about the telescope better and point it precisely at targets of interest. They also studying the mast's mechanics and how they affect the telescope's directions.

 NuSTAR has continued to team up with other observatories, including NASA's Chandra and Swift telescopes, to make coordinated observations. The observations they produce will allow astronomers to understand the data and gain a proper insight about the events in the cosmos.

Built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va, NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena.

The first image captured by this telescope is that of Cygnus X-1. This particular black hole was chosen because it is extremely bright in X-rays, allowing the NuSTAR team to easily see where the telescope's focused X-rays are falling on the detectors.

The $165 million telescope will soon begin its exploration of hidden black holes, cinder balls left over from the star explosions and other sites of extreme physics in our cosmos.

The NuSTAR's mission will last for at least two years focusing on most energetic objects in the universe producing images with 100 times the sensitivity and 10 times the resolution of its predecessors operating at the same wave length.