NuSTAR Inches Toward its Rocket

At Vandenberg Air Force Base's processing facility in California, the separation ring on the aft end of NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, , at right, inches its way toward the third stage of an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket under the watchful eye of a member of the Orbital Sciences technical team. The spacecraft is being mated to the rocket, a major milestone in prelaunch preparations. After processing of the rocket and spacecraft are complete, they will be flown on Orbital's L-1011 carrier aircraft from Vandenberg to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on the Pacific Ocean’s Kwajalein Atoll for launch. The high-energy x-ray telescope will conduct a census of black holes, map radioactive material in young supernovae remnants, and study the origins of cosmic rays and the extreme physics around collapsed stars.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar.

Photo credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin, VAFB