Successful launch for NASA's 'black hole hunter' telescope

WASHINGTON: A sophisticated orbiting telescope that uses high-energy X-ray vision to hunt for black holes in the universe launched on Wednesday after a two-stage aircraft-to-rocket takeoff, NASA said.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) was lifted into the skies by Orbital Sciences' L-1011 aircraft, carrying a rocket on its underbelly that later launched the satellite.

"With spacecraft separation confirmed, the Orbital Sciences' Pegasus XL rocket has successfully launched NASA's NuSTAR spacecraft into orbit," NASA said in a statement.

Such plane-assisted launches are less expensive than ground-based launches because they require less fuel to boost cargo away from the pull of Earth's gravity, the US space agency said.

The jet took off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

The NuSTAR project aims to study energetic phenomena such as black holes and the explosions of massive stars.

"NuSTAR will open a whole new window on the universe," said Fiona Harrison, who is a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and is the principal investigator on NuSTAR.

It will be the "first telescope to focus high energy X-rays. As such it will make images that are 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than any telescope that has operated in this region of the spectrum."

The mission aims to work in concert with other telescopes in space, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which observes lower-energy X-rays, NASA said.

NuSTAR is more potent than its predecessors because of the way it focuses high-energy X-ray light by using nested shells of mirrors to prevent the light from reflecting off.

With 133 nested mirrors in each of two optical units, the telescope also uses state-of-the-art detectors and a long mast that connects the optical units to the detectors and allows enough distance for a sharp focus.

The 33-foot (10-meter) mast will launch in a folded-up position but will extend about a week after launch, bringing it to about the length of a school bus.

"It used to be thought that black holes were rare and exotic -- that was just 20 years ago," Harrison told reporters.

"Today we know that every massive galaxy, like our Milky Way, has a massive black hole at its heart."

The new observatory aims to give a better view of the workings of a black hole, since the dust and gas that gets sucked into the gravity of a black hole becomes quite hot from speed and friction created as it circulates around the edge.

Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, described NuSTAR as "a small space telescope that will provide world-class science in an important but relatively unexplored band of the electromagnetic spectrum."

The first data from the telescope is not expected for about 30 days.