NuSTAR's Mirrors Baked in Zhang's Glass Kitchen

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

New Ideas Sharpen Focus for Greener Aircraft

Leaner, greener flying machines for the year 2025 are on the drawing boards of three industry teams under contract to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project.

Teams from The Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, Calif., Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, Calif., and Northrop Grumman in El Segundo, Calif., have spent the last year studying how to meet NASA goals to develop technology that would allow future aircraft to burn 50 percent less fuel than aircraft that entered service in 1998 (the baseline for the study), with 50 percent fewer harmful emissions; and to shrink the size of geographic areas affected by objectionable airport noise by 83 percent.

"The real challenge is we want to accomplish all these things simultaneously," said ERA project manager Fay Collier. "It's never been done before. We looked at some very difficult metrics and tried to push all those metrics down at the same time."

So NASA put that challenge to industry – awarding a little less than $11 million to the three teams to assess what kinds of aircraft designs and technologies could help meet the goals. The companies have just given NASA their results.

For more info, visit : http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/greener_aircraft.html