My Job, Part 1: The Project.

NASA is planning to launch the NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) satellite in February 2012. Its primary mission will last two years and includes:

1. take a census of collapsed stars and black holes of different sizes by surveying regions surrounding the center of own Milky Way Galaxy and performing deep observations of the extragalactic sky; 2. map recently-synthesized material in young supernova remnants to understand how stars explode and how elements are created; and 3. understand what powers relativistic jets of particles from the most extreme active galaxies hosting supermassive black holes. NuSTAR will be the first focusing high energy X-ray satellite in orbit, providing more than two orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity as compared to previous high energy missions.

"Well," one might wonder, "WTF is a high energy X-ray satellite?" I'm glad you asked. However, I'm not going to tell you the details. A great description is on this webpage. Basically, NuSTAR will be a telescope that looks at X-rays rather than light. Here is a drawing of what the satellite will look like:

If you look at the end of that optics thingy on the right, you can see that there are two circles. The optics housing is two cylinders, each of which contains an optic. My job is to help build those optics.

Here is a NASA photo taken May 16 that shows the first optic with 82 of the eventual 133 layers:



Of course, I can do better, and I will in Part 2. The optic is now at 130 layers, and everyone is more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.