NASA's hunting season has just begun, as the U.S. space agency today launched its Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft into orbit on a quest for black holes.

Less than an hour after being flung out of the Earth's atmosphere (see video below), the advanced telescope was reportedly safely on its intended course and already prepping for its two-year mission to study the universe's black holes and remnants of supernova explosions.

With a fundamentally new, high-energy X-ray telescope, NASA will be able to see "the hottest, densest, and more energetic objects," with more high-definition images than ever before, according to Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology.

One of the first targets for the $165 million NuSTAR observatory is Cygnus X-1, a black hole in our own galaxy, according to William Craig, NuSTAR instrument manager at the University of California at Berkeley. The local black hole acts as a perfect point source for scientists to check the clarity of its images, Craig told according to Space.com.

"With NuSTAR, we'll be able to image the sky, read the story and understand things like how galaxies form, and how black holes grow," Harrison said during a Monday press briefing.

The telescope, which uses the same types of X-rays that doctors or airport security systems do, has more than 10 times the resolution and more than 100 times the sensitivity of its predecessors, while operating in a similar energy range, NASA said.

This won't be a solo mission for NuSTAR, though. Other space telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, will join hands with the new telescope to provide a more complete picture of what NASA calls "the most energetic and exotic objects in space."

Four years after its inception, the NuSTAR mission, which NASA's Astrophysics division director Paul Hertz called "low-cost" and a "modest investment," will provide "world-class science in an important but relatively unexplored band of the electromagnetic spectrum," Hertz said.

The NuSTAR mission has been awaiting liftoff since March, when the U.S. space agency delayed the launch pending a review of the rocket.

NASA last week scrapped a similar X-ray telescope project dubbed GEMS, or Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer, due to budget constraints. Though still in the design stage, it cost the space agency $13 million to cancel the mission, which would have launched the machinery on a mission to look for black holes, neutron stars, and remnants of dead star systems.

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NASA Launches Black Hole-Hunting Telescope

NASA chief Charlie Bolden got an up-close look Wednesday (June 13) at SpaceX's unmanned Dragon space capsule, the first private vehicle ever to dock with the International Space Station.

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NASA Chief Visits History-Making Private Space Capsule

11-06-2012 20:45 NASA EDGE interviews NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden about his life and his legacy at NASA.

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NASA EDGE: Charlie Bolden - Video

12-06-2012 13:56 During a powerful solar blast in March, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the sun. The discovery heralds Fermi's new role as a solar observatory, a powerful new tool for understanding solar outbursts during the sun's maximum period of activity. "For most of Fermi's four years in orbit, its Large Area Telescope (LAT) saw the sun as a faint, steady gamma-ray source thanks to the impacts of high-speed particles called cosmic rays," said Nicola Omodei, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California. "Now we're beginning to see what the sun itself can do." A solar flare is an explosive blast of light and charged particles. The powerful March 7 flare, which earned a classification of X5.4 based on the peak intensity of its X-rays, is the strongest eruption so far observed by Fermi's LAT. The flare produced such an outpouring of gamma rays -- a form of light with even greater energy than X-rays -- that the sun briefly became the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky. At the flare's peak, the LAT detected gamma rays with two billion times the energy of visible light, or about 4 billion electron volts (GeV), easily setting a record for the highest-energy light ever detected during or just after a solar flare. The flux of high-energy gamma rays, defined as those with energies beyond 100 million electron volts (MeV), was 1000 times greater than the sun's steady output. The March 7 flare also is ...

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NASA | Fermi Detects Gamma Rays from a Solar Flare - Video

LOS ANGELESNASA has a new X-ray eye in the sky.

The space agency's latest X-ray telescope was boosted into orbit Wednesday to begin a two-year mission to search for black holes and other hard-to-see celestial objects.

The telescope was launched by a rocket released from a carrier aircraft that took off from a remote Pacific island.

The rocket ignited its engines and climbed to space. About 15 minutes later, the telescope separated from the rocket as planned and unfurled its solar panels as it orbited about 350 miles above the Earth.

NASA chose to air-launch the $170 million mission because it's cheaper than rocketing off from a launch pad.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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NASA launches X-ray telescope over Pacific

NASA's administrator is to visit the history-making Dragon spacecraft at a Texas rocket factory.

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NASA chief to see history-making SpaceX capsule

Is there any stopping Amazon's ascension? With NASA out, will OpenStack get liftoff? Have your say below. Photo: NASA Goddard Photo and Video/Flickr

First NASA said it was grounding its work on OpenStack, the open source cloud rival to Amazon it co-founded. And now it seems the space agency is all-in on Amazon, with NASAs CIO recently touting (and Amazon echoing) that using Amazon Web Services could save the agency $1 million a year.

And if breakups were not already hard enough, reports note that OpenStack was not even mentioned when NASA was talking up its new cloud partner. Gotyes Somebody That I Used to Know might sum up how most are reporting it:

But you didnt have to cut me off Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing And I dont even need your love But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough

However, when NASA said it would no longer be working with OpenStack, it was also getting a lot of big IT-attention. As Cloudline reported at the time: OpenStack has come into its own, IBMs Dr. Angel Luis Diazwrote for us in April. So with Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Rackspace, and Red Hat on board, the time has come to scale back involvement, NASA says.Karen Petraska, from NASAs CIO office, said the agency is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a smart consumer of commercial cloud services,reports Web Host Industry News.

As Wired Enterprise reports this week, all that private sector love had a little help from NASA folks. NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, and many of the key contributors have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to foundNebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty foundedPiston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASAs OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

Have your say: If a space agency can get what it needs from Amazons cloud, is OpenStack going to have a hard time getting off the ground?

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With NASA on Amazon, Will OpenStack Get Liftoff?

NASA's $165 million Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission will scan the skies for X-ray emissions from black holes.

NASA is counting down to the planned launch of its newest space telescope today (June 13) on a mission to search for black holes in the universe.

The $165 millionNuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array(NuSTAR)mission will hunt for black holes by scanning X-ray light at higher energies than any spacecraft before.

TheNuSTAR telescope is set to launchatop an unmanned Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket, which will be carried into launch position by an L-1011 "Stargazer" jet aircraft taking off from the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. The launch was originally slated for 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT), but has now been pushed back by half an hour to noon EDT (1600 GMT) to allow technicians to check out a minor technical issue. The issue has now been cleared, but the timeline is slightly delayed from the extra work. The vehicle has a four-hour launch window available today.

Forecasters predict a 90 to 95 percent chance of good weather for the launch, with only a slim chance of rain threatening the liftoff.

The NuSTAR project is one of NASA's Small Explorer missions, and is expected to spend two years mapping the universe's black hole population.

The school bus-sizeNuSTARwill target some of the most mysterious parts of our universe, such as the high-energy regions where matter is falling onto black holes, as well as the leftovers from dead stars after they've exploded in supernovas.

"It really is a new way of doing business to try to focus on the hard X-ray," said William Craig, NuSTAR instrument manager at the University of California at Berkeley, during a Monday briefing.

About 70 minutes before launch, NuSTAR's carrier plane will depart Kwajalein and fly to a spot 117 nautical miles south of the atoll, where it will drop the rocket at an altitude of 39,000 feet over the ocean.

Mission managers officially gave NuSTAR's rocket the go-ahead to launch after an in-depth mission readiness review meeting on Tuesday (June 12).

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NASA to launch school-bus-sized space telescope to hunt black holes (+video)

NASA's $165 million Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission will scan the skies for X-ray emissions from black holes.

NASA is counting down to the planned launch of its newest space telescope today (June 13) on a mission to search for black holes in the universe.

The $165 millionNuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array(NuSTAR)mission will hunt for black holes by scanning X-ray light at higher energies than any spacecraft before.

TheNuSTAR telescope is set to launchatop an unmanned Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket, which will be carried into launch position by an L-1011 "Stargazer" jet aircraft taking off from the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. The launch was originally slated for 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT), but has now been pushed back by half an hour to noon EDT (1600 GMT) to allow technicians to check out a minor technical issue. The issue has now been cleared, but the timeline is slightly delayed from the extra work. The vehicle has a four-hour launch window available today.

Forecasters predict a 90 to 95 percent chance of good weather for the launch, with only a slim chance of rain threatening the liftoff.

The NuSTAR project is one of NASA's Small Explorer missions, and is expected to spend two years mapping the universe's black hole population.

The school bus-sizeNuSTARwill target some of the most mysterious parts of our universe, such as the high-energy regions where matter is falling onto black holes, as well as the leftovers from dead stars after they've exploded in supernovas.

"It really is a new way of doing business to try to focus on the hard X-ray," said William Craig, NuSTAR instrument manager at the University of California at Berkeley, during a Monday briefing.

About 70 minutes before launch, NuSTAR's carrier plane will depart Kwajalein and fly to a spot 117 nautical miles south of the atoll, where it will drop the rocket at an altitude of 39,000 feet over the ocean.

Mission managers officially gave NuSTAR's rocket the go-ahead to launch after an in-depth mission readiness review meeting on Tuesday (June 12).

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NASA to launch school-bus-sized space telescope to hunt black holes

NASA is poised to launch its latest X-ray space telescope on a two-year hunt for hard-to-see objects lurking in the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

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NASA to launch X-ray telescope from Pacific island

NASA on Wednesday launched its newest X-ray space telescope on a mission to shine a light on black holes and other hard-to-see objects lurking in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

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NASA launches telescope to seek out black holes

11-06-2012 08:56 Research scientist Colin Seftor talks about images from the OMPS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite. Suomi (NPP) launched in the fall of 2011. These images show smoke from Asia that migrates to North America. Seftor explains the importance of aerosols to the studies of climate as well as how critical it is to collect long term data records. This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Facebook: Or find us on Twitter:

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NASA | Suomi Sees Asian Fires Migrate To North America - Video

Teflon from the drill on NASA's Curiosity rover could contaminate Martian soil, say scientists, creating misleading evidence of an ancient alien civilization that had developed nonstick cookware.

An unexpected contamination problem has cropped up for NASA's next Mars rover, but scientists are confident the huge robot will still be able to complete its mission after it lands on the Red Planet in August.

NASA scientists discussed the contamination concern and a new Mars landing plan for the car-sizeCuriosity roverin a teleconference with reporters today (June 11). The contamination issue, they said, concerns the rover's drill.

When Curiosity ultimately bores into a Martian rock, small amounts of Teflon and other contaminants from the drill will likely seep into the sample, NASA officials said. These introduced materials may make it tougher for the Curiosity team to search for organic carbon the building blocks of life as we know it here on Earth on the Red Planet.

While researchers are still working to get a handle on the problem, they don't think it will significantly hinder the Curiosity rover or its $2.5 billion mission, which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

Right now, the overall sense on the mission team is that "it's not a serious problem, because we see so many potential ways to work around this that we could use," Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters today. [Curiosity - The SUV of Mars Rovers]

Meanwhile, Grotzinger and his team also said today that they have trimmed down the landing zone for the Curiosity rover in order to bring it closer to its final target: a huge mountain inside Mars' giant Gale Crater.

Curiosity launched in late November and is due to touch down inGale Crateron the night of Aug. 5. After it lands, it will embark on a roughly two-Earth-year mission to determine if the Gale Crater area is, or ever was, capable ofsupporting microbial life.

The 1-ton rover will use10 science instrumentsto get at the question. One of those instruments, known as Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, is a chemistry laboratory stripped down to the size of a microwave oven.

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How NASA's Curiosity rover could 'discover' Teflon on Mars

HAMPTON, Va. - Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center are marking five years of collaboration with Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems in Louisville, Colo., as partners in the design and development of the Dream Chaser(R) Space System.

NASA Langley and SNC joined forces to update Langley's HL-20 lifting body vehicle design into the Dream Chaser orbital crew vehicle, which is being developed as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. Langley engineers had devised a development plan for the HL-20 in the 1980s and 90s, creating pilot landing scenarios in simulators, testing designs in wind tunnels and even building a full-scale model - with the help of universities - to study crew challenges.

"We're thrilled to see our HL-20 design being advanced by Sierra Nevada and glad to have the chance to work with the company on the further development of its Dream Chaser," said Robbie Kerns, manager of the Commercial Space Projects Office at NASA Langley.

"NASA Langley has been an engaged and supportive partner since the beginning of our Dream Chaser Program," said Mark Sirangelo, Corporate Vice President and head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. "The Dream Chaser was born at NASA through the great work of the Langley Center. We would not be where we are without the talented NASA people, past and present, who have enabled our Dream Chaser vehicle to start its operational flight testing." Sirangelo recently visited NASA Langley in Hampton, Va., as part of this commemoration and for a joint corporate/government executive session on the program.

The NASA-SNC team has joined together with engineers at United Launch Alliance, makers of Dream Chaser's launch vehicle, the Atlas V, to perform buffet tests on the launch vehicle/orbitalcrew vehicle stack. Testing just completed in NASA Langley's Transonic Dynamics Tunnel will evaluate the pressure fluctuations the launch vehicle stack mayexperience during its ascent to low Earth orbit.

SNC is one of several companies working to develop commercial crew transportation capabilities under the Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) agreement with NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). NASA's CCDev effort is being led by NASA's Kennedy Space Center and supported by NASA technical experts across the agency, including NASA Langley for a variety of technical areas.

NASA also is developing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS), a crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket that will provide an entirely new capability for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Designed to be flexible for launching spacecraft for crew and cargo missions, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit and enable new missions of exploration across the solar system.

For more information about NASA Langley, please go to: http://www.nasa.gov/langley

For more information on NASA's commercial Crew Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

For more information about Sierra Nevada, visit: http://www.SNCSpace.com

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NASA Langley Celebrates Five-Year Partnership With Sierra Nevada

Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, have recently lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency's climate science programs.

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Space Leaders Charge NASA Doesn't Demand Right Stuff From Climate Science Programs

Because NASA's NEEMO missions put participants in a hostile, alien environment, they're good analogs for expeditions to asteroids, planets, moons or other space destinations, officials said.

Four aquanauts descended to an undersea research base off the Florida Keys Monday (June 11), kicking off a 12-day mission designed to help future spaceflyers explore near-Earth asteroids.

The four adventurers entered the Aquarius research station which sits 62 feet (19 meters) down in the ocean about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) off Key Largo at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) Monday, NASA officials said.

The 16th expedition in the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations program, or NEEMO, has now officially begun. BecauseNEEMO missionsput participants in a hostile, alien environment, they're good analogs for expeditions to asteroids, planets, moons or other space destinations, officials said.

NEEMO aquanauts can simulate living on a spacecraft and test techniques forfuture space missions. NASA can also weigh down the participants to varying degrees, to simulate different gravity environments.

NEEMO 16 will focus on ways to help future astronauts explore near-Earth asteroids, a key priority for NASA. Two years ago, President Barack Obama instructed the space agency to work toward sending humans to a nearby space rock by 2025. [Gallery: Visions of NASA Asteroid Mission]

"We're trying to look out into the future and understand how we'd operate on anasteroid," NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, NEEMO principal investigator, said in a statement. "You don't want to make a bunch of guesses about what you'll need and then get to the asteroid to find out it won't work the way you thought it would. NEEMO helps give us the information we need to make informed decisions now."

NEEMO 16's undersea crew consists of astronaut Dottie M. Metcalf-Lindenburger, Japanese spaceflyer Kimiya Yui, European Space Agency astronaut Timothy Peake and Cornell University professor Steven Squyres, who is also the lead scientist for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers.

The crewmembers' activities over the next 12 days will focus on three core areas dealing with communication delays, figuring out optimum crew sizes and coming up with ways to attach to asteroids (and stay attached to a space vehicle during excursions).

Metcalf-Lindenburger, Yui, Peake and Squyres will stay underwater for the duration of NEEMO 16, which concludes June 22.

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NASA astronauts train for deep space mission deep below the sea

The NASA control center that gave the command to launch rockets to the moon and send space shuttles into orbit will be opened for public tours this week for the first time in more than 30 years.

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'Go' for Tours: NASA Invites Public Inside Historic Launch Control Center

NASA will be storing information on nebulas only on Amazon soon. Image: bobfamiliar/Flickr

NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazons widely popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform and into the arms of Amazon.

As Amazon happily pointed out on its Amazon Web Services blog, NASA chief information officer Linda Cureton recently told the world that in moving part of its infrastructure to Amazons cloud, the space agency can save about a million dollars a year. With Amazon Web Services, or AWS, you get instant access to online storage and virtual servers so you neednt set up your own hardware.

Cureton discussed a host of other technologies set to come online at the space agency. But there was no mention of OpenStack, an open source platform that lets you build an Amazon-like service inside your own data center. The idea is that you can give your employees instant access to computing resources in much the same way Amazon provides such virtual infrastructure to the world at large.

NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, after years of developing code for its own internal infrastructure, but as Gigaom reported in late May, the space agency is now halting development of software for the open source platform.

Since its inception, many of the key contributors of NASAs OpenStack project have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to found Nebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty founded Piston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASAs OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

McKenty says that Curetons plans are certainly a win for Amazon, but plays down the impact of her decisions, saying she has authority over the practices of the agencys central operation, but not over the individual NASA research centers, including NASA Ames, where OpenStack was developed. As a whole, he believes, NASA is still a diverse mix of cloud technologies such as Terramark and Lockheed Martin.

I see this totally out of context with whatever else NASA is doing as far as data center consolidation, virtualization, private cloud, all the stack software and everything else, McKenty tells Wired.

In addition to Rackspace, OpenStack is backed by HP, Cisco, IBM, and Red Hat, and project organizers claim over 3,000 contributors. A spokesman for NASA said that while the agency still had interest in the platform, its needs were being met through commercial offerings i.e. Amazon Web Services and others.

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NASA Embraces Amazon Cloud, Leaves OpenStack Behind

TUCSON, Ariz. — NASA’s newest rover, the massive Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, is less than two months away from plunging into the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet — a harrowing seven-minute dive that will use a landing never-before attempted on another world.

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For NASA's Huge Mars Rover, Stakes High for Landing Success

NASA's latest spacecraft to Mars is due to land in August even as engineers are troubleshooting a contamination issue with one of its instruments.

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NASA rover on target for August landing on Mars