The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft was launched on a Pegasus XL rocket which was dropped from a Lockheed L-1011 "TriStar" aircraft flying over the Pacific Ocean near the Kwajalein Atoll on June 13, 2012, as can be seen in this video. NuSTAR, the first focusing high-energy X-ray telescope in orbit, operates in the band from 3 to 79 keV, extending the sensitivity of focusing far beyond the ~10 keV high-energy cutoff achieved by all previous X-ray-imaging satellites. To attain the required 10m focal length needed for its telescopes, NuSTAR used a unique deployable mast, or boom, that extended the optics after the payload was in orbit.
The observatory consists of two co-aligned grazing-incidence X-ray telescopes pointed at celestial targets by a three-axis stabilized spacecraft. Deployed into a 600 km, near-circular, 6 degree inclination orbit, the observatory has completed commissioning, and is performing consistent with pre-launch expectations. 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 over the collimated or coded mask instruments that he operated in this bandpass.
Using its unprecedented combination of sensitivity and spatial and spectral resolution, NuSTAR is pursuing five primary scientific objectives:
(1) probing obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity out to the peak epoch of galaxy assembly in the universe (at z