The 33-foot-long Tinkertoy-like mast was unfurled via commands from the mission control center at UC Berkeley starting at 1:43 p.m. EDT (1743 GMT), cranking out of its 34-inch-wide canister to provide the necessary distance between the craft's optics and X-ray detectors.
"The mast has deployed! We are on our way to getting the best views yet of high-energy X-rays in our universe!" the mission team tweeted.
Built in California by the ATK-Goleta firm, the structure is a scaled version of the mast flown in 2000 aboard the space shuttle for a radar-mapping topography mission.
That technology was repurposed for astrophysics on NuSTAR, enabling a satellite small enough to fit inside the Pegasus XL rocket's nose, yet deploy a long enough focal length in space to do the job.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in contrast, achieved the proper focal length given its huge size and launching in the space shuttle's roomy payload bay.
"Chandra launched on the shuttle, so you could fit the whole 10 meters into the shuttle bay. We have a very small launch vehicle for a low-cost mission, so this will be the first time that an unfolding focal length bench like this has been demonstrated for an astronomical telescope," Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator, said in an interview before launch.
NuSTAR and its ability to "focus" promises to produce images 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive to bring an unprecedented clarity to the high-energy band of X-rays for astronomers to peer deeper into the universe.
"NuSTAR will help us find the most elusive and most energetic black holes, to help us understand the structure of the universe," said Harrison.
The NuSTAR spacecraft was manufactured by Orbital Sciences for NASA using the LEOStar 2 design. In its current stowed configuration nestled within the Pegasus rocket's nose cone, the satellite is 3.7 by 6.3 feet and weighs 772 pounds. Now fully deployed in space with its telescope optics mast unfurled, the craft will measure 3.9 by 37.3 feet.
"It's a real pleasure to know that the mast, an accomplished feat of engineering, is now in its final position," said Yunjin Kim, NuSTAR project manager at JPL.
At the heart of NuSTAR is a telescope consisting of two co-aligned high-energy X-ray optic units and two shielded detectors with that mast separating them. The spacecraft will detect X-rays with energies between 5 and 80 kilo electron volts (keV).
"With its unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution to the previously poorly explored hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum, NuSTAR will open a new window on the universe and will provide complementary data to NASA's larger missions, including Fermi, Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer," said Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director.
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"As soon as the spacecraft has been separated, we turn on the transceiver…and start to communicate with the ground through TDRSS that basically the spacecraft is working. The ACS (attitude control) system starts controlling it and pointing it to the right direction, and then we deploy the solar array."
Deployment of the 33-foot-long mast between the telescope optics and the X-ray detectors will occur next week.
"Then we do the spacecraft checkout roughly about a week. On the seventh day, we will actually deploy the mast. It's a 10-meter mast, so we have seven non-explosive actuators that need to be fired to release it, and then we'll deploy the mast. It takes roughly about 25 minutes to deploy," Kim said.
Commission of the observatory will take a few weeks before scientific research begins with NASA's newest space telescope.
"Altogether from launch until starting to acquire the science data, the nominal plan is 30 days."
The first stage was 33.7 feet long, 4.2 feet in diameter, a wingspan of 22 feet and produced 163,000 pounds of thrust. The second stage is 4.2 feet long and 4.2 feet wide for 44,000 pounds of thrust.
With the batteries activated there is just 90 seconds to launch today or else an abort will be called. That is due to the limited life of the batteries.
In the final moments prior to release of Pegasus, the L-1011 carrier aircraft crew will oversee the last seconds of the countdown and push the button that will drop the air-launched vehicle, with the NuSTAR spacecraft aboard, from the belly of the jet.
The circuitry for the release system has been armed by the launch panel operator aboard the aircraft. Later, a switch will be flipped in the cockpit by the co-pilot. This switch, located on the right-hand portion of the center console between the captain and pilot, "enables" the release to be become active.
In the final seconds of the countdown the Orbital Sciences launch conductor on the ground will call out "drop on my mark...3, 2, 1, drop." At that point, the co-pilot will push a button next to the enable switch, releasing the Pegasus rocket and NuSTAR to fall away from the L-1011 aircraft. See a photo of the drop button taken during a tour of the L-1011.
"It takes a couple seconds and then it releases," Capt. Bill Weaver explained during a previous interview. "There is no doubt about it that the rocket has released. There is a tremendous reaction throughout the airplane. It weighs 52,000 pounds, so we experience an instantaneous weight loss of 52,000 pounds and the center of gravity shifts aft 10 percent, so the nose comes up in a pretty pronounced fashion, which is good because we like that for separation.
"We drop it at 39,000 feet and after the drop we end up eventually around 41,000, we gain a couple thousand feet altitude or separation and also we do about a 10 degree heading change to get out of the rocket exhaust.
"Five seconds after we drop it, (Pegasus) is about 500 feet below drop altitude and the first stage lights off and it pulls up. In the meantime, we have turned 10 degrees off the heading. By the time we roll out we can see it. We can hear it. When that rocket motor lights off it sounds like a freight train roaring underneath the plane. It is a pretty impressive event.
"We don't really see till we get out of the bank, then we have a really good view. We can see it all the way through first stage burn out, second stage ignition. We can't normally see the stage 3. One time we did at Vandenberg. Conditions were just right -- perfect sun, perfect atmosphere."
The first stage is 33.7 feet long, 4.2 feet in diameter, has a wingspan of 22 feet and produces 163,000 pounds of thrust. The second stage is 4.2 feet long and 4.2 feet wide for 44,000 pounds of thrust. The third stage is 4.4 feet long and 3.2 feet in diameter with a thrust of 8,000 pounds.
Shortly after separation, the power-generating solar array will be unfolded to a size of 29 square feet to produce 729 Watts of electricity to run the onboard systems and science instrument. The craft has two lithium-ion batteries.
At the heart of NuSTAR is a telescope consisting of two co-aligned high-energy X-ray optic units and two shielded detectors with a 33-foot separating them to provide the necessary focal length.
The spacecraft will detect X-rays with energies between 5 and 80 kilo electron volts (keV).
"We work in the high-energy X-rays, a little bit above Chandra and XMM, a little bit below Fermi," said Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist. "That includes the energy regime that dentists use to study your teeth."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission, or SMEX, led by the California institute of technology and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The site, occurring within the U.S. Army's missile-testing range, affords the small launcher the ability to heave satellites into equatorial orbits.
For NuSTAR, the far-away locale is ideally positioned to place the satellite into a 373-mile-high orbit that hugs the equator, going no further north or south than 6 degrees latitude.
A team of 85 people from NASA, Orbital Sciences and the spacecraft group has traveled to the Central Pacific atoll, halfway between Hawaii and Australia, in support the NuSTAR launch.
"There are two objectives. One is finding new black holes and trying to understand their distribution, their distances and their global properties. And then studying black holes that we know and trying to understand what they look like in detail.
"Another interesting thing NuSTAR will do is look at the sun. We had solar physicists come and tell us how revolutionary it would be to study solar flares with NuSTAR, so toward the end of the two years, we'll look at our own sun. That will be the closest object that we will look at.
"The baseline mission is two years just because that's what NASA has committed to funding, but the orbit lifetime is more like seven or eight years. As long as NuSTAR continues to do exciting science, I think NASA, budget issues aside, would continue to support it.
"The first two years are really planned and executed by the science team, which consists of about 100 members from seven different countries. But we're hoping if NASA extends the mission, they will open it up so that any astronomer can compete for time on the telescope and broaden the range of science that NuSTAR can do."
"One of the things I'm really excited about is we have a lot of really exciting coordinated observations with all sorts of other observatories like XMM and the Swift telescope, and Chandra as well. So in the first year, we're actually going to spend about 20 to 30 percent of the time doing coordinated observations.
"We have a fairly large program to measure the spin of massive black holes. The things we can know about them are their mass, their spin and their charge, but in the universe, black holes are not charged, so really the mass and spin are the relevant things to measure, and by partnering with XMM, we have a program for some nearby sources to actually measure the spin, which can tell us how black holes built up over cosmic time. Was it mostly from mergers of two smaller mass black holes, or from dust and gas falling onto the black hole?
"That's sort of 20 to 30 percent of the time, and the other 70 to 80 percent of the time we are doing these new surveys.
"We've spending fairly large blocks of time covering what we call survey fields. They're not large fields. They are maybe a square degree or two. We call it a survey because it is covering a region much larger than the actual field-of-view of the telescope. We're not surveying the whole sky. We're selecting interesting fields like near the center of our own galaxy."
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Early activities include establishing the proper configuration of the Range and powering up the Pegasus rocket for initial launch day testing.
Takeoff of the L-1011 carrier headed to the launch box remains scheduled for about 10:30 a.m. EDT, with the release of Pegasus targeted for 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT).
Watch this page for live reports during the countdown and launch!
The aircraft will take off from the runway at Kwajalein Atoll around 10:30 a.m. in preparation for the launch at 11:30 a.m. EDT.
Watch this page for updates throughout the morning and a live streaming video broadcast starting at 10 a.m. EDT.
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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft, a $180 million NASA mission, seeks to unmask black holes believed to be in the center of all large galaxies. As recently as 15 years ago, scientists believed black holes were rare objects.
What's more, the space telescope will study the relics of exploded stars and probe our own Sun's corona. Science observations will begin about a month after launch.
"Some of the first things we'll be doing is looking at the center of the Milky Way at the Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole that resides in our own galaxy. Every once in a while it has hiccups, and that could be planets being swallowed. One of the first programs we have is to coordinate with Chandra and other observatories to watch what's happening with our own galactic black hole, also to survey the regions around that black hole to look for the remnants of previous stellar explosions, black holes, neutron stars, things that are left over after stars much more massive than the sun explode," said Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator from Caltech.
"We're also going to look at SN1987A, which we know is a massive star that collapsed in 1987. We should be able to still see it glowing in radioactivity.
"We're going to start our survey for looking for massive black holes in the universe. We're covering a couple of fields that have been well-studied by Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer, and one of the fields is called the cosmos field. We're going to go searching for massive black holes there, particularly those that are hidden behind lots of dust and gas and are not visible to lower-energy X-ray telescopes."
NuSTAR gets into space aboard the air-launched Pegasus XL rocket made by Orbital Sciences. Final assembly was completed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California before being ferried last week to the U.S. Army's launch range in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific.
Testing, rehearsals and reviews were completed over the past few days, clearing the way for Wednesday's countdown leading to the 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT) launch time.
Under the control of pilot Bill Weaver, the modified L-1011 carrier aircraft with Pegasus hooked to its belly should be airborne about an hour before launch for the trip to the rocket's pre-set drop point over the Pacific Ocean about 120 miles south of Kwajalein Atoll.
Wednesday's available launch window extends from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. EDT (1530-1930 GMT).
Weather forecasters predict an 85 percent chance of favorable conditions.
With the push of a button in the Stargazer's cockpit by co-pilot Ebb Harris, the 52,000-pound Pegasus rocket is cast free to fall for five seconds, dropping 300 feet below the aircraft while traveling at Mach 0.82. During the plunge, the onboard flight computer will sense the rocket's separation from the carrier jet and issue a command to release the safety inhibits in preparation for ignition.
The first stage solid-fueled motor of Pegasus is lit at T+plus 5 seconds to begin the powered journey to orbit on an east-southeasterly heading into an equatorial orbit desired by NuSTAR.
At T+plus 1 minute, 17 seconds, the Orion 50S XL first stage motor consumes all of its solid-fuel propellant and burns out at an altitude of 34 miles. A short ballistic coast period begins before the spent first stage, including the wing structure, is separated at T+plus 1 minute, 31 seconds to fall into the Pacific.
The Pegasus rocket's Orion 50 XL second stage begins firing at T+plus 1 minute, 32 seconds to continue the trek to orbit. During the firing, at T+plus 2 minutes, 8 seconds, the payload fairing nose cone that protected the satellite during atmospheric ascent is jettisoned at an altitude of 72 miles.
Having consumed its supply of solid-fuel propellant, the second stage motor burns out at T+plus 2 minutes, 45 seconds some 112 miles in altitude. The rocket will coast for a few minutes toward the high point of its trajectory before releasing the spent stage at T+plus 8 minutes, 55 seconds.
The solid-fueled Orion 38 third stage ignites at T+plus 9 minutes, 6 seconds to deliver NuSTAR spacecraft into a 373-mile-high orbit around Earth. That orbit is achieved with burnout of the third stage at T+plus 10 minutes, 14 seconds, completing the powered phase of the Pegasus rocket's 41st launch for the winged booster since 1990.
Deployment of the 772-pound satellite occurs due south of Hawaii at T+plus 13 minutes, 14 seconds.
In the subsequent days, initial checkout of the Orbital-built spacecraft systems will be performed before the 33-foot-long deployable mast to provide the proper focal length between the telescope optics and X-ray detectors occurs a week into the mission.
"The mast was developed by ATK in Goleta (California), and they have about 100 extendable booms or structures in space right now with a 100 percent success rate. I recognize it looks scary, and we will be nervous when it extends, but there is no reason to expect any problems. It's a pretty simple design, and it's very similar to the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. We're basically a scaled-down version of that," said Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist from JPL.
The mast structure allowed NuSTAR to remain small enough to fit within the low-cost Pegasus rocket's nose cone. Other X-ray observatories, like the schoolbus-sized Chandra, needed vastly larger and costlier launches.
"Chandra launched on the shuttle, so you could fit the whole 10 meters into the shuttle bay. We have a very small launch vehicle for a low-cost mission, so this will be the first time that an unfolding focal length bench like this has been demonstrated for an astronomical telescope," said Harrison.
"Once it is extended, that's it. It's a one-time deployment, and we do not intend to do any retraction," said Yunjin Kim, NuSTAR project manager at JPL.
"We did many deployment tests at ATK, so we feel very confident that it will deploy," Kim added.
NuSTAR and its ability to "focus" promises to produce images 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive to bring an unprecedented clarity to the high-energy band of X-rays for astronomers to peer deeper into the universe.
"I would say, for me, some of the most exciting observations will be looking at the remnants of exploded stars, where, for the first time, we can really map out radioactive material, and also observations of the very massive black holes," said Harrison. "We're not only surveying regions of the sky, but we're studying these known very massive black holes much more sensitively, and by putting those observations together with other wave bands...we'll get a much more detailed picture of how matter is falling onto these very massive black holes, what makes them radiate and what do they really look like."
The simulation allowed all of the team members to practice their roles and responsibilities one last time before the real deal next week. The rocket and its carrier jet, however, remained on the ground for the mock event.
Activities on the atoll during the week the Pegasus spends there includes a Combined Systems Test to ensure all elements of the rocket, payload, L-1011 carrier aircraft and ground network are working properly for launch. The checkout had been performed prior to leaving Vandenberg and gets repeated at Kwajalein following the long ferryflight.
Upcoming is the Launch Readiness Review that will grant approval to move into the countdown for the $180 million mission.
See a series of four photos on Twitter: here, here, here and here from Orbital Sciences showing the landing.
As planned during the inbound leg of the journey, the aircraft flew the "race track" pattern for the launch countdown and through the intended "drop box" where the Pegasus will be released to verify good telemetry communications links for next week's mission.
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Pegasus is destined for a remote launch site halfway between Hawaii and Australia where the booster will be air-launched next Wednesday to place a NASA X-ray telescope into space.
Vandenberg is the home port for Pegasus, the place where the rocket was assembled, tested and fitted with the NuSTAR spacecraft cargo. This two-day ferryflight will take the vehicle to the Kwajalein Atoll for launch into an equatorial orbit that the satellite desires.
Check out this photo gallery from the event!
The Orbital Sciences booster will depart the West Coast on Tuesday for a two-day ferryflight to the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, part of the U.S. Army's vast missile range.
On launch day, currently targeted for June 13 (U.S. time), the carrier jet will haul the rocket to 39,000 feet and release it at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT), allowing the three-stage Pegasus to propel the NuSTAR satellite into orbit.
The remote site was selected for the NuSTAR launch since the Pegasus will be aiming for an equatorial orbit, the type of perch that Kwajalein is well positioned to reach.
Weighing 772 pounds, the spacecraft is ideally sized for the Pegasus launch that will be making its 41st flight. Its heritage includes deploying over 70 satellites since 1990 for NASA, commercial customers and the U.S. military.
NuSTAR will extend a 33-foot-long boom once in its 373-mile-high orbit, providing the necessary separation between the spacecraft's optics and X-ray detectors.
The mission is the first space telescope that will provide scientists with "focused" X-ray images of objects in the universe emitting the highest energies, such as supermassive black holes, remnants of collapsed stars and gamma-ray sources. Researchers hope to catch a supernova explosion in our local neighborhood during the mission's two-to-five year life.
"We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a fundamentally new high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much deeper and crisper images than before," said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator, who first conceived of the mission 20 years ago.
Pegasus and NuSTAR passed their Flight Readiness Review on Friday, clearing the way for the rocket's rollout to the L-1011 park site adjacent to Vandenberg's runway on Saturday. Combined systems testing between the duo will be conducted ahead of the takeoff.
NASA, Orbital and the Air Force will be hosting a tour of the rocket and L-1011 for reporters on Monday. We'll be there, so check back for photos, video and full coverage of the upcoming launch!
Engineering reviews of the air-launched Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus rocket continue, according to NASA, with officials focusing on software to be used by a new computer flying on the Pegasus for the first time.
The reviews were not finished in time for the $165 million mission to be ready before the end of a launch window in late March.
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The Flight Readiness Review was held Thursday with officials at the Kwajalein Atoll launch site, the Pegasus rocket's homeport at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Kennedy Space Center where NASA manages the deployment mission. But that meeting concluded with the decision to postpone the launch from the no-earlier-than end-of-March timeframe.
"The delay will allow additional time to assure that the flight software to be used with a new Pegasus flight computer will issue commands to the rocket as intended," NASA said in a statement.
"The time required to complete the work moves the launch period beyond the timeframe currently available on the range at the launch site."
NASA is working with officials at the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll to determine a new launch opportunity. That next slot "is anticipated to be within the next couple of months," the NASA statement read.
The air-launched Pegasus rocket and NuSTAR spacecraft, which were integrated at Vandenberg, will be flown to Kwajalein about a week before the mission. On launch day, the L-1011 carrier aircraft will take the Pegasus out of the ocean and release the winged booster to fire into orbit.
Kwajalein is the site of U.S. military missile testing. Previous Pegasus launches have occurred there, and SpaceX set up a pad for its Falcon 1 rocket.
The site was selected for the NuSTAR launch since the Pegasus will be aiming for an equatorial orbit, the type of perch that Kwajalein is well positioned to reach.
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft had been aiming for launch next Thursday, March 22, but officials announced today that the schedule is being delayed to conduct data and simulations necessary for qualifying the software in the Pegasus flight computer.
"The intent is to assure the computer is commanding the Pegasus properly," a NASA spokesperson said.
The traditional Flight Readiness Review to grant approval to continue with the launch preparations that had been slated to occur yesterday, Sunday, March 11, but has slipped to no sooner than Thursday, March 15.
The satellite has been attached to the Pegasus in a cleanroom at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. If the Flight Readiness Review goes well Thursday, the rocket would roll to the runway Friday and mate to its L-1011 carrier aircraft in preparation for the trek to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands where the launch will originate.
NuSTAR will be inserted into a low-Earth, equatorial orbit to observe the high-energy X-ray sky with much greater sensitivity and clarity than ever before.
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The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is the space agency's next astrophysics probe. NuSTAR is a black hole hunter, and its innovative X-ray optics will explore the universe at unmatched sensitivities at high-energy wavelengths.
"We have a lot of exciting observations planned for the first six months," said Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR's principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology. "Everybody's getting really psyched."
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