Studying Radiation
NASA will launch several new missions to better understand radiation and charged particles in the universe. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is scheduled for launch on March 16. NuSTAR will scan the night sky for high energy x-rays, building on and seeing at higher ranges than previous x-ray telescopes such as Chandra. It will help astronomers answer many questions about the universe and look for supernova remnants, black holes a billion times the mass of the sun, and subatomic particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light.
In August, the agency will launch the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, to study how the sun influences the Earth and its radiation belts. And December will see the launch of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), a probe that will look at the solar wind and corona.
Image: The NuSTAR telescope in space. NASA