The nuclear spectroscopic telescope array (NuSTAR) high-energy X-ray mission

Kristin K. Madsen; Fiona A. Harrison; Hongjun An; Steven E. Boggs; Finn E. Christensen; Rick Cook; William W. Craig; Karl Forster; Felix Fuerst; Brian Grefenstette; Charles J. Hailey; Takao Kitaguchi; Craig Markwardt; Peter Mao; Hiromasa Miyasaka; Vikram R. Rana; Daniel K. Stern; William W. Zhang; Andreas Zoglauer; Dominic Walton; Niels J. Westergaard

doi:10.1117/12.2056643

24 July 2014 The nuclear spectroscopic telescope array (NuSTAR) high-energy X-ray mission

Kristin K. Madsen, Fiona A. Harrison, Hongjun An, Steven E. Boggs, Finn E. Christensen, Rick Cook, William W. Craig, Karl Forster, Felix Fuerst, Brian Grefenstette, Charles J. Hailey, Takao Kitaguchi, Craig Markwardt, Peter Mao, Hiromasa Miyasaka, Vikram R. Rana, Daniel K. Stern, William W. Zhang, Andreas Zoglauer, Dominic Walton, Niels J. Westergaard

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 91441P (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2056643
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission was launched on 2012 June 13 and is the first focusing high-energy X-ray telescope in orbit operating above ~10 keV. NuSTAR flies two co-aligned Wolter-I conical approximation X-ray optics, coated with Pt/C and W/Si multilayers, and combined with a focal length of 10.14 meters this enables operation from 3-79 keV. The optics focus onto two focal plane arrays, each consisting of 4 CdZnTe pixel detectors, for a field of view of 12.5 arcminutes. The inherently low background associated with concentrating the X-ray light enables NuSTAR to probe the hard X-ray sky with a more than 100-fold improvement in sensitivity, and with an effective point spread function FWHM of 18 arcseconds (HPD ~1), NuSTAR provides a leap of improvement in resolution over the collimated or coded mask instruments that have operated in this bandpass. We present in-orbit performance details of the observatory and highlight important science results from the first two years of the mission.

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Kristin K. Madsen, Fiona A. Harrison, Hongjun An, Steven E. Boggs, Finn E. Christensen, Rick Cook, William W. Craig, Karl Forster, Felix Fuerst, Brian Grefenstette, Charles J. Hailey, Takao Kitaguchi, Craig Markwardt, Peter Mao, Hiromasa Miyasaka, Vikram R. Rana, Daniel K. Stern, William W. Zhang, Andreas Zoglauer, Dominic Walton, and Niels J. Westergaard "The nuclear spectroscopic telescope array (NuSTAR) high-energy X-ray mission", Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91441P (24 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2056643

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