Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “AstroPhysics”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,279 records · Page 71
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A New Era of Astrophysics with NASA’s JWST

JWST - launched December 25, 2021 - is poised to change the way we understand the universe, and we are already making some groundbreaking discoveries in just the first several months of operations. I will discuss the engineering milestones that made the mission possible, as well as the over-arching scientific themes/goals of the telescope: first galaxies around the time of cosmic reionization, galaxy assembly and evolution, the birth of stars & protoplanetary systems, and study of planets (both within the solar system and exoplanets). I will also discuss specific scientific programs approved for Cycle 1, as well as early results from the mission.

James Webb Space Telescope↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

STAR-X: Survey and Time-domain Astrophysical Research eXplorer

STAR-X is a MIDEX mission proposed to NASA in December 2021. Comprising an X-ray telescope (XRT) provided by GSFC and MIT, a UV telescope (UVT) provided by the University of Colorado, and a spacecraft (SC) provided by Ball Aerospace, STAR-X is designed to conduct time-domain survey and to respond rapidly to transient events discovered by other observatories such as LIGO, Rubin LSST, Roman WFIRST, and SKA. The key features of the XRT are its excellent PSF (2.5 arc-seconds half-power diameter), large effective area (1,800 cm2 at 1 keV), and large field of view (1 deg2), making it more than an order of magnitude more capable and more sensitive than Chandra and Swift/XRT to conduct survey and to find and study transient sources. The UVT has a 30-cm aperture with 5 filters covering the 160nm to 340nm band, providing simultaneous spectral coverage with the XRT and enabling reverberation mapping of accretion disk geometries around black holes. The SC is highly autonomous and is capable of fast slewing, enabling efficient raster scans and time-domain surveys. In particular, in combination with a state-of-the-art mission operations center at the University of Colorado, the SC can respond to targets of opportunity within 2 hours 90% of the time. With its nearly equatorial low-earth orbit, STAR-X’s telescopes will have low particle background, enabling them to have unprecedented sensitivity for measuring faint diffuse emissions from clusters of galaxies. STAR-X is a timely response to Astro2020’s recommendation for a space-based, sustaining time-domain and multi-messenger program.

William W. Zhang↗
NASA NTRS2022

NIAC Phase-2 Final Report for Astrophysics and Technical Lab Studies of a Solar Neutrino Spacecraft Detector

The Sun provides all the energy that our planet needs for life and has been doing so for five billion years. Understanding our Sun and its interior is one of the major goals of the NASA Science program. Still this is a very difficult task because very little makes it directly out of the Sun’s interior. The energy we see today, that warms the Earth, was made 50,000 to 80,000 years ago and is only now coming to the surface to make light. However, neutrinos penetrate matter almost without interaction and make it to Earth in only eight minutes from creation. Since neutrinos interact only weakly they are hard to detect; never-the-less within the last ten years neutrino detectors on Earth have started to reliably detect neutrinos from the fusion reactions in the interior of the Sun and scientists have started to use this information to investigate the Sun’s nuclear furnace. Changes in solar neutrino flux make it advantageous to take a neutrino detector into space since the solar neutrino intensity changes dramatically as the inverse square of the distance from the Sun, by five orders of magnitude when going from the Earth to the Sun. Launch of a neutrino detector into space toward the Sun will: a) aim to significantly increase the neutrino flux 10,000x allowing for a smaller detector which improves detector energy resolution and performance, b) attempt to completely eliminate background terrestrial neutrino sources for improved measurement accuracy, and c) conduct unique science experiments near the Sun not achievable with much larger detectors on the Earth. NASA's interest in deep space exploration has been a key factor in its unmanned spacecraft development and launch of exploration science satellites and spacecraft. NASA has done exceptional experiments in space where science benefits from the unique platform of spacecraft that provides unprecedented views. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope is really a small and very common instrument, but when it is put into an orbit high above the Earth, it becomes one of the most powerful optical observatories man has ever made. Moving neutrino observations to space is the next obvious step. The concept of putting a neutrino detector in close orbit of the sun is completely unexplored and innovative. Its scientific return is to vastly enhance the understanding of the solar interior which is a NASA major goal as stated in the decadal survey. Preliminary calculations show that such a spacecraft if properly shielded, can operate in this environment both taking data of neutrino interactions which can be distinguished from random background rates of solar Electromagnetic emissions, Galactic charged cosmic-ray, and gamma-rays by using a double pulsed signature. The NIAC Phase-1 simulations have shown this idea to be very successful in eliminating background and identifying the neutrino interaction signal, hence this spacecraft detector concept once demonstrated to be Technical Readiness Level 7 and flight mission-ready would enable a whole new type of mission to explore and study our Sun, in details that could neither be done with the largest neutrino detectors on Earth nor other types of space-craft measurements that are not using neutrino detection. Our goal in this NIAC Phase-2 was to take the detector simulation ideas and construct a prototype for testing in the lab with tagged sources to evaluate and demonstrate that the performance in the simulations are borne out by a prototype.

Neutrino↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Next Generation X-ray Optics for Astrophysics: High Resolution, Light Weight, and Low Cost

Ready a technology with the following features, compared to Chandra’s. Much better angular resolution: - On-axis: Comparable(~0.5”HPD) by 2026, 5Xbetter by ~2030 - Off-axis: 10Xbetter at 10-arcmin off-axis Much lighter weight per unit area–at least 10Xlighter Much lower cost per unit area–at least 10X lower in real year dollars

Silicon X-ray mirrors↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mission Concept, Science, and Technology of the PRIMA Astrophysics Probe

PRIMA addresses questions about the origins and growth of planets, supermassive black holes, stars, and dust. Much of the radiant energy from these formation processes is obscured and only emerges in the far infrared (IR) where PRIMA observes (24–261 um). PRIMA’s PI science program (25% of its 5-year mission) focuses on three questions and feeds a rich archival Guest Investigator program: How do exoplanets form and what are the origins of their atmospheres? How do galaxies’ black holes and stellar masses co-evolve over cosmic time? How do interstellar dust and metals build up in galaxies over time? PRIMA provides access to atomic (C, N, O, Ne) and molecular lines (HD, H2O, OH), redshifted PAH emission bands, and far-IR dust emission. PRIMA’s 1.8-m, 4.5-K telescope serves two instruments using sensitive KIDs: the Far-InfraRed Enhanced Survey Spectrometer (continuous, high-resolution spectral coverage with over an order of magnitude improvement in spectral line sensitivity and 3-5 orders of magnitude improvement in spectral survey speed) and the PRIMA Imager (hyperspectral imaging, broadband polarimetry). PRIMA opens new discovery space with 75% of the time for General Observers.

Jason Glenn↗