Dr. Yunjin Kim presents NuSTAR January 19

On LASS-O's third visit to NASA JPL, we had the great honor of meeting Dr. Yunjin Kim, the project manager for one of JPL's most recent projects: NuSTAR. Dr. Kim's unexpected humor and genuine interest in each student's personal artistic endeavors made our time together very enjoyable. Being the project manager of the mission, we really could not have spoken with a more knowledgeable NuSTAR source than Yunjin. For those who are not so up to date on their NASA news, NuSTAR, standing for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array, is an Explorer mission scheduled to launch in February 2012. NuSTAR will be mapping the universe through high energy x-rays, hoping to give astronomers a better understanding of Black Holes, and potentially even Dark Matter.

Dr. Kim explained to us LASS-Oers that many scientists believe every galaxy to have a huge black hole in the center of it, and it is their hope that through the high-definition information sent back from the NuSTAR telescope, these theories may be proven and further explored. NuSTAR will look into the Galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and maybe even come across some evidence of Dark Matter. "We would love to find Dark Matter, but we probably won't. If we do, we'll probably win the Nobel Prize" said Dr. Kim. We learned that NASA will have control of all observations made by NuSTAR for the first two years, and then the use of NuSTAR will open up for community research (via application process) in the next one to three years.

After hearing Dr. Kim speak, I have no doubt that NuSTAR will be a ground breaking mission to write some significant history. The ideas of Black Holes and Dark Matter are still such foggy concepts to many, and to be able to capture high-definition photographs of these mysteries seems almost too good to be true! Dr. Kim's passion for this mission was evident throughout his talk, and it really got me excited and curious about these perplexing Black Holes and Dark Matter; I came home from our JPL field trip just to dive into online research, papers, opinions and discussions on this fascinating subject matter. If you choose to follow the progress of one NASA JPL mission, I would strongly recommend you make it this one!