At 16:00 UTC June 13, 2012, the NuSTAR X-ray observatory began its successful journey into orbit! The satellite was launched using a Pegasus rocket, a smaller vehicle that is literally dropped from an airplane and blasts away into space. This method saves a huge amount of fuel by starting the rocket a few kilometers above the ground. [The image shown here is from a different Pegasus drop and is for explanatory purposes; I'm hoping to get some nice images of the actual NuSTAR launch soon.]NuSTAR (NUclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) is designed to detect high-energy X-rays emitted by some of the most violent objects in the Universe: exploding stars, matter falling into black holes, and magnetars (super-magnetic neutron stars that are capable of fierce blasts of energy).
X-ray astronomy is a lot harder to do than regular-old visible light astronomy. For one thing, our air absorb X-rays, so we have to launch telescopes into orbit to see these objects at all.
For another, at these high energies, it’s not possible to focus X-rays in a normal way. Photons of visible light bounce off of mirrors, ...
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