Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, was intended to be a space-based X-ray telescope such as Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton. The program was cancelled in February 2006 as NASA presented its 2007 budget. On September 21, 2007 it was announced that the program had been restarted, with an expected launch in 2011.

NuSTAR was intended to use grazing incidence mirrors to focus high energy X-rays from astrophysical sources. Its primary goals were to conduct a deep survey for supermassive black holes, study particle acceleration in active galaxies, and measure radioactive isotopes in young supernova remnants in our own Galaxy. NuSTAR was a NASA Small Explorer class mission. The Principal Investigator was Fiona Harrison, of the California Institute of Technology. Other partners included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Columbia University, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sonoma State University, and the Danish Space Research Institute. NuSTAR's planned launch date was February 2009. It was planned to cost NASA a total of US$134,000,000.

Columbia University's contribution centered on developing the curved glass used in the array, which was formed using specific heat cycles in specialized slumping ovens. Most of this research took place at Columbia's Nevis Laboratories research facility in Irvington, NY.