The satellite has a design life of at least five years. The satellite is owned and operated by DLR, and the scientific data rights remain with DLR. In exchange, EADS Astrium/Infoterra received the exclusive commercial exploitation rights for the TerraSAR-X data. In this arrangement, EADS Astrium funded part of the implementation cost of the TerraSAR-X system. In 2002, EADS Astrium GmbH was awarded a contract to implement the X-band TerraSAR satellite (TerraSAR-X) on the basis of a public-private partnership agreement (PPP). The project is supported by BMBF (German Ministry of Education and Science) and managed by DLR (German Aerospace Center). During development, the number of X-ray telescopes in the array was reduced from three to two.TerraSAR-X1 (also referred to as TSX or TSX-1) is a German SAR satellite mission for scientific and commercial applications (national project). The spacecraft was originally to be based on the Spectrum Astro SA-200S bus, but after the restart of the program Orbital was selected to provide a LEOStar-2 based bus. In September 2007 NASA restarted the program for a planned launch in early 2012. A laser metrology system monitors the mast alignment.Ī decision on proceeding to flight development with NuSTAR was to be made by early 2006 for a launch in 2008, but it was cancelled in February 2006. The design chosen is produced by Able Engineering, and is a straightforward reduction of the 60 m mast successfully deployed for the SRTM program. The long focal length requires the use of a 10 m extendable mast. All major elements of the instrument have flight heritage (space flight and HEFT balloon experiment). Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CdZnTe) detectors provide excellent spectral resolution and high quantum efficiency without requiring cryogenic operation.
The optics utilize thin glass shells coated with depth-graded multi-layers to extend the bandpass and FOV over that achievable with standard metal surfaces. The grazing incidence mirrors focus onto two shielded solid-state pixel detectors, separated by a mast that extends the focal length to 10 m after launch. The NuSTAR instrument consists of an array of two co-aligned hard X-ray telescopes.
NuSTAR will ordinarily follow a preprogrammed observation plan, but will have the capability of responding to transient opportunities within a day of notification. The planned mission will last for three years, although less than half that time is required to meet the core science goals. NuSTAR is a pointed telescope, which was launched by a Pegasus-XL into a low-Earth, equatorial orbit from Kwajalein. NuSTAR will survey this energy band for X-ray emission from quasars and Galactic black hole binaries, and obtain spectra of hard X-ray emission from supernova remnants and study the spectral lines created by nuclear transitions which dominate this spectral range.
NuSTAR ( Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) is a X-ray survey mission, which is first satellite to fly a focussing X-ray telescope in space for energies in the 8-80 keV.range.