NASA said it's successfully launched its NuSTAR X-ray observatory into orbit Wednesday after it was dropped from an aircraft over the central Pacific Ocean, according to UPI. An L-1011 "Stargazer" aircraft, operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., took off from Kwajalein Atoll with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope attached to Orbital's Pegasus XL rocket, both strapped to the belly of the aircraft. At noon EDT, the rocket dropped from the L-1011, free-falling for 5 seconds before firing its first-stage motor. About 13 minutes later, NuSTAR separated from the rocket, reaching its final low-Earth orbit, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Wednesday. "NuSTAR spread its solar panels to charge the spacecraft battery and then reported back to Earth of its good health," Yunjin Kim, the mission's project manager at JPL, said. "We are checking out the spacecraft now and are excited to tune into the high-energy X-ray sky." NuSTAR will detect the highest energy X-ray light from the cosmos, seeing through gas and dust to reveal black holes lurking in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as those hidden in the hearts of faraway galaxies, mission officials said. "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," Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, said.
