The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR): optics overview and current status

Hailey, Charles J.; An, Hongjun; Blaedel, Kenneth L.; Brejnholt, Nicolai; Christensen, Finn Erland; Craig, William W.; Decker, Todd A.; Doll, Melanie; Gum, Jeff; Koglin, Jason E.; Jensen, Christian Damsgaard; Hale, Layton C.; Mori, Kaya; Pivovaroff, M. J.; Sharpe, Marton; Stern, Marcela; Tajiri, Gordon; Zhang, William W.

doi:10.1117/12.857654

Cited by 30 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…The high-energy effective area cutoff results from the K-shell absorption in Platinum. Hailey et al (2010) describe the optics implementation in detail, and Table 3 provides a summary of the primary configuration parameters.…”

Section: Science Instrument Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of the Advance Energetic Pair Telescope (AdEPT) for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Hunter

Bloser

Dion

et al. 2010

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray

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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a NASA Small Explorer mission that will carry the first focusing hard X-ray (5 -80 keV) telescope to orbit. NuSTAR will offer a factor 50 -100 sensitivity improvement compared to previous collimated or coded mask imagers that have operated in this energy band. In addition, NuSTAR provides sub-arcminute imaging with good spectral resolution over a 12-arcminute field of view. After launch, NuSTAR will carry out a two-year primary science mission that focuses on four key programs: studying the evolution of massive black holes through surveys carried out in fields with excellent multiwavelength coverage, understanding the population of compact objects and the nature of the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, constraining explosion dynamics and nucleosynthesis in supernovae, and probing the nature of particle acceleration in relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei. A number of additional observations will be included in the primary mission, and a guest observer program will be proposed for an extended mission to expand the range of scientific targets. The payload consists of two co-aligned depth-graded multilayer coated grazing incidence optics focused onto solid state CdZnTe pixel detectors. To be launched in early 2012 on a Pegasus rocket into a low-inclination Earth orbit, NuSTAR largely avoids SAA passages, and will therefore have low and stable detector backgrounds. The telescope achieves a 10.15-meter focal length through on-orbit deployment of an extendable mast. An aspect and alignment metrology system enable reconstruction of the absolute aspect and variations in the telescope alignment resulting from mast flexure during ground data processing. Data will be publicly available at GSFC's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) following validation at the science operations center located at Caltech.

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Section: Science Instrument Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of the Advance Energetic Pair Telescope (AdEPT) for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Hunter

Bloser

Dion

et al. 2010

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray

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“…ASTRO-H [3] and NuS-TAR [4]), but beyond 100 keV an efficient way to focus photons appears to be the use of diffraction techniques from crystals. The use of gamma-ray focusing optics is also crucial for improving the angular resolution, the best being now obtained with coded mask telescopes (about ∼ 15 arcmin of the mask in the case of INTE-GRAL/ISGRI).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

The LAUE project for broadband gamma-ray focusing lenses

et al. 2011

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“…The NuSTAR optics design has been described elsewhere, 4,5 and the fabrication of the NuSTAR flight optics is described in detail in these proceedings (Craig et al, "Fabrication of the NuSTAR Flight Optics", SPIE 8147-15, 2011). 6 Here we briefly summarize the aspects of the optics design and fabrication that are of particular importance to calibration of the effective area and point spread response function (PSF).…”

Section: Optics Design and Fabricationmentioning

confidence: 99%

First results from the ground calibration of the NuSTAR flight optics

Koglin

Barrière

et al. 2011

SPIE Proceedings

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NuSTAR is a hard X-ray satellite experiment to be launched in 2012. Two optics with 10.15 m focal length focus Xrays with energies between 5 and 80 keV onto CdZnTe detectors located at the end of a deployable mast. The FM1 and FM2 flight optics were built at the same time based on the same design and with very similar components, and thus the performance of both is expected to be very similar. We provide an overview of calibration data that is being used to build an optics response model for each optic and describe initial results for energies above 10 keV from the ground calibration of the flight optics. From a preliminary analysis of the data, our current best determination of the overall HPD of both the FM1 and FM2 flight optics is 52", and nearly independent of energy. The statistical error is negligible, and a preliminary estimate of the systematic error is of order 4". The as-measured effective area and HPD meet the toplevel NuSTAR mission sensitivity requirements.

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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR): optics overview and current status

Cited by 30 publications

References 0 publications

Development of the Advance Energetic Pair Telescope (AdEPT) for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Development of the Advance Energetic Pair Telescope (AdEPT) for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

The LAUE project for broadband gamma-ray focusing lenses

First results from the ground calibration of the NuSTAR flight optics

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