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6 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012 YOU don’t have to be big to hunt black holes. NASA’s telescope NuSTAR, which was due to take off from an island in the South Pacific on 13 June, is small enough to fit beneath the belly of an aircraft, even with its launch rocket. Once in orbit, it will unfold to the length of a school bus. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will be the first telescope to bring high-energy X-rays into focus, letting astronomers map and study the extreme physics around black holes and the explosions of massive stars. Its images of these objects will be 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than those of previous telescopes. To make such sharp images, the telescope needs to focus X-rays with energies of up to 100 kiloelectronvolts – 10 times as energetic as those sought by Crisper black holes previous X-ray telescopes – onto a small area. Visible light telescopes can manage this with a focusing lens relatively close to the eyepiece. But because the X-rays are so energetic, NuSTAR’s camera needs to be 10 metres away from the focusing lens. NuSTAR is on a tight budget: the whole mission should cost only $170 million. As the team could not afford to launch a 10-metre-long telescope, NuSTAR got scrunched up. “It’s no ordinary-looking telescope,” says NuSTAR’s principal investigator, Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Its “lens” is made up of 133 nested shells of fingernail-thin glass. At launch, the cameras will sit right next to the lenses. A week after it settles into orbit, NuSTAR will push the lenses away from the camera on a thin scaffold. Harrison, who conceived of NuSTAR in the 1990s, thinks the cheap, ingenious scope could be a new model for budget-bedevilled NASA. “It shows you can make huge advances with a relatively small mission,” she says. Brains damaged A FREEZER failure at the world’s largest repository of human brains has led to the loss of 147 of them, including a rare collection of 53 brains from donors with autism. Researchers at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, only noticed the thaw – on 31 May – when they opened the freezer door; the temperature display still read -79 °C. The rising temperature had also failed to trigger two alarm systems on separate circuits. Camera footage suggests that the perfect storm of technical failures was not due to foul play, but McLean spokeswoman Laura Neves says nothing has been ruled out at this stage. Two internal investigations into the failure are under way. The good news is that some information may be salvageable. All 53 autistic brains and 12 others had been cut in half, with one half frozen and one half preserved in formaldehyde. The preserved tissue remains available for study. –Just add taikonauts– Heavenly Palace beckons CHINA’S space station is to be a ghost town no longer. A crewed space capsule is scheduled to dock with the nation’s orbiting Tiangong-1 space lab for the first time next week. Though the feat won’t break new technological ground, it will be a major achievement for the superpower that came late to the space race. “The fact that China is going it alone here is significant,” says Roger Launius, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “It gains critical experience for China in long-duration missions, rendezvous and docking – something it must do to close the gap between it and the other spacefaring nations.” As New Scientist went to press, China was preparing to launch its Shenzhou-9 mission on 16 June. A Soyuz-derived crew capsule carrying three taikonauts will launch atop a Long March-2F rocket (pictured) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in north-west China. Two days later, the aim is to dock with Tiangong-1 (“Heavenly Palace”) – a 10-metre long, 3-metre diameter space lab launched in September last year. The crew is expected to include China’s first female taikonaut. The ability to flit crews between Earth and an orbital station will be a “significant step” for China, chief designer Zhou Jianping told China’s official news agency, Xinhua. Launius says it’s no new technical feat, though: “Space stations in orbit go back to the 1970s.” Russia orbited Salyut in 1971, while NASA lofted Skylab in 1973. “As the NASA team could not afford to launch a 10-metre-long telescope, they scrunched it up” INVESTMENTS up, share prices down. Renewable energy had a topsy-turvy 2011 and faces more of the same in the coming years. Reports by the UN Environment Programme and the international Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century show that renewables supplied 20.3 per cent of global electricity by the end of 2011, with a record $257 billion pumped into the sector. Solar power was the big winner, receiving $147 billion. A downside to cheap solar panels CHINAFOTOPRESS/GETTY But solar power firms suffered huge drops in share prices, with some filing for bankruptcy. One reason is that governments have cut their financial support for solar as the price of solar panels has fallen. “The challenge for policy-makers is to reduce support at just the right pace,” says Michael Liebreich, CEO of analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Cutting subsidies too fast would cripple the sector, but keeping them for too long will waste money. UPFRONT
