WORLD
NASA to Hunt Black Holes with New Space Telescope
Baku, June 1 (AZERTAC). After months of delay, NASA`s newest space telescope is just two weeks away from launching on an ambitious mission to seek out the universe`s black holes and investigate their mysterious origins.
The space agency`s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is slated to launch June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The X-ray space telescope will ride into orbit on a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences, which is designed to launch in midair from a rocket-carrying aircraft. The mission has been awaiting launch since March, when NASA delayed its liftoff pending a review of the rocket.
NuSTAR will study how black holes form and grow, and how these processes affect their host galaxies, said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of the NuSTAR mission at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif.
"It`s the very first telescope to focus high-energy X-rays," Harrison told reporters today (May 30) in a news briefing. "This will enable NuSTAR to study some of the hottest, densest and most energetic phenomena in the universe, for example black holes and explosions of massive stars."