Henric Krawczynski, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a $1.3 million NASA grant to develop finely pixelated semiconductor detectors and their readout electrons for the next generation of telescopes able to focus light in the high-energy X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Among the objects whose emissions the telescopes can bring into focus are black holes, active galaxies and supernova remnants.
The detectors are destined for a follow-up mission to the NuSTAR mission, an X-ray telescope, launched in 2012 that observes high-energy astrophysics phenomena in the 3-79 keV energy band. The new detectors will be matched to a new generation of low-cost, low-mass X-ray mirrors, which achieve an order of magnitude better angular resolution than the NuSTAR mirrors.