It pays to persevere. No one knows this better than Will Zhang.
For more than a decade, the astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., experimented with a new technique for efficiently manufacturing super-thin, low-cost curved telescope mirror segments to collect and focus ever-elusive, high-energy X-ray photons.
The fruits of that labor - a total of 9,000 individual mirror segments - are now assembled into telescope optics and installed inside NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a small Explorer mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The agency plans to launch NuSTAR on March 21, 2012 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands aboard a Pegasus rocket attached to the underside of the L-1011 Stargazer aircraft.
NASA's latest X-ray space telescope, which will detect X-rays from objects ranging from our sun to monstrous black holes billions of light-years away, is unique in that it will be the first orbiting telescope to focus X-rays in the high-energy range, creating the most detailed images ever taken in this slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In comparison, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory senses less energetic "soft" X-rays, and therefore, cannot pierce the dust that frequently enshrouds black holes. Once deployed, NuSTAR will complement measurements gathered by Chandra and give scientists a more complete picture of the X-ray universe.
Read more on http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/mirror-bake.html
For more than a decade, the astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., experimented with a new technique for efficiently manufacturing super-thin, low-cost curved telescope mirror segments to collect and focus ever-elusive, high-energy X-ray photons.
The fruits of that labor - a total of 9,000 individual mirror segments - are now assembled into telescope optics and installed inside NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a small Explorer mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The agency plans to launch NuSTAR on March 21, 2012 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands aboard a Pegasus rocket attached to the underside of the L-1011 Stargazer aircraft.
NASA's latest X-ray space telescope, which will detect X-rays from objects ranging from our sun to monstrous black holes billions of light-years away, is unique in that it will be the first orbiting telescope to focus X-rays in the high-energy range, creating the most detailed images ever taken in this slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In comparison, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory senses less energetic "soft" X-rays, and therefore, cannot pierce the dust that frequently enshrouds black holes. Once deployed, NuSTAR will complement measurements gathered by Chandra and give scientists a more complete picture of the X-ray universe.
Read more on http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/mirror-bake.html
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