THE NUCLEAR SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE ARRAY (NuSTAR) HIGH-ENERGY X-RAY MISSION

By F. Harrison, W. Craig, F. Christensen, C. Hailey, Will Zhang, S. Boggs, Daniel Stern, W. R. Cook, K. Forster, P. Giommi and 71 more. Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2013

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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, launched on 2012 June 13, is the first focusing high-energy X-ray telescope in orbit. NuSTAR 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 satellites. 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 have operated in this bandpass. Using its unprecedented combination of sensitivity and spatial and spectral resolution, NuSTAR will pursue five primary scientific objectives: (1) probe obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity out to the peak epoch of galaxy assembly in the universe (at z ≲ 2) by surveying selected regions of the sky; (2) study the population of hard X-ray-emitting compact objects in the Galaxy by mapping the central regions of the Milky Way; (3) study the non-thermal radiation in young supernova remnants, both the hard X-ray continuum and the emission from the radioactive element 44Ti; (4) observe blazars contemporaneously with ground-based radio, optical, and TeV telescopes, as well as with Fermi and Swift, to constrain the structure of AGN jets; and (5) observe line and continuum emission from core-collapse supernovae in the Local Group, and from nearby Type Ia events, to constrain explosion models. During its baseline two-year mission, NuSTAR will also undertake a broad program of targeted observations. 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° inclination orbit, the observatory has now completed commissioning, and is performing consistent with pre-launch expectations. NuSTAR is now executing its primary science mission, and with an expected orbit lifetime of 10 yr, we anticipate proposing a guest investigator program, to begin in late 2014.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

X-Ray Emissions from Accreting White Dwarfs: A Review (2017, background): “The first satellite to achieve this is the NuSTAR mission (2012–present; Harrison et al. 2013).”
NuSTAR DISCOVERY OF A 3.76 s TRANSIENT MAGNETAR NEAR SAGITTARIUS A* (2013, background): “These mirror/detector units provide 58′′ (half-power diameter) and 18′′ (FWHM) imaging resolution over the 3–79 keV X-ray band, with a characteristic spectral resolution of 400 eV (FWHM) at 10 keV (Harrison et al. 2013).”
New Spectral Model for Constraining Torus Covering Factors from Broadband X-Ray Spectra of Active Galactic Nuclei (2018, background): “The 100-fold increase in sensitivity in the hard X-ray band (> 10 keV) brought by NuSTAR (Harrison et al. 2013) made it possible to study the spectral signatures of the torus in detail.”
A quasi-periodic modulation of the iron line centroid energy in the black hole binary H1743−322 (2016, background): “The Nuclear SpecTroscopic ARray (NuSTAR; Harrison et al. 2013) observed the source from ∼18:20 on September 23 until ∼08:50 on September 25 (obs ID 80001044004).”
CALIBRATION OF THE NuSTAR HIGH-ENERGY FOCUSING X-RAY TELESCOPE (2015, methodology): “INTRODUCTION The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) was successfully launched in June 2012 (Harrison et al. 2013).”
Conceptual design of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) (2014, methodology): “HEFT was the pathfinder for NASA’s NuSTAR [46], launched in 2012 and the first satellite mission to use focusing x-ray optics to image in the hard x-ray band up to 80 keV.”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “Currently, the most convincing relativistic line profile and best data are from an observation of Serpens X-1 with NuSTAR, which give rNS ≤ 15 km (and thus a surface redshift zNS ≥ 0.16 for MNS = 1.4 M⊙) for a broad set of fits, and rNS ≤ 12.6 km if the disk extends to the ISCO ([283]).”
COMPTON-THICK ACCRETION IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, methodology): “The value of fCT obtained by Civano et al. (2015) from combining NuSTAR detections in the 3–8, 8–24, and 3–24 keV bands is larger than the value predicted by the models consistent with Swift/BAT measurements.”
The Blazar TXS 0506+056 Associated with a High-energy Neutrino: Insights into Extragalactic Jets and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, methodology): “…open access MWL data with public tools during the period from MJD 58019 to MJD 58059 from the following instruments: KVA (Lindfors et al. 2016), UVOT and XRT onboard the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory (Swift) (Roming et al. 2005), NuSTAR (Harrison et al. 2013) and Fermi-LAT (Atwood et al. 2009).”
Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “3 to 10 keV) (48),MAXI Gas Slit Camera (GSC) (2 to 10 keV) (49), Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) (3 to 79 keV) (50), and the INTernational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) (20 to 250 keV) (51), with detections by Swift and NuSTAR .”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “LSST will provide a crucial complementary capability to space experiments operating in other wavebands, such as the ongoing NuSTAR Mission (Harrison et al. 2013) and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (e.g., Atwood et al. 2010).”
BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. V. X-Ray Properties of the Swift/BAT 70-month AGN Catalog (2017, background): “NuSTAR (Harrison et al. 2013), launched in 2012, is the first focussing hard X-ray telescope on-orbit, and its serendipitous survey has detected 497 sources in the first 40 months of observations (Lansbury et al. 2017b, see also Chen et al. 2017).”
THE McGILL MAGNETAR CATALOG (2013, background): “NASA’s NuSTAR mission (Harrison et al. 2013), the first focusing hard X-ray telescope, may help in this regard.”