Repair kit for NASA’s NICER mission heading to space station

NASA will ship a patch equipment for NICER (Neutron star Inside Composition Explorer), an X-ray telescope on the Worldwide Area Station, on the company’s Northrop Grumman twenty first business resupply mission. Astronauts will conduct a spacewalk to finish the restore.

Positioned close to the space station’s starboard solar array, NICER was broken in Might 2023. The mission staff delivered the patch equipment to NASA’s Johnson Area Middle in Houston in Might 2024 so it might be prepped and packed for the upcoming resupply mission.

“It is unbelievable that in only one yr, we had been capable of diagnose the issue after which design, construct, take a look at, and ship an answer,” mentioned Steve Kenyon, NICER’s mechanical lead at NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’re so excited to see the patches put in throughout a future spacewalk, return to a extra common working schedule, and preserve doing groundbreaking science.”

From its perch on the station, the washing machine-sized NICER research the X-ray sky. It has exactly measured superdense stellar remnants known as neutron stars, which comprise the densest matter scientists can straight observe. It has additionally investigated mysterious quick radio bursts, noticed comets in our solar system, and picked up knowledge about Earth’s higher ambiance.

However in Might 2023, NICER developed a “gentle leak,” the place undesirable daylight started getting into the telescope.

Images taken aboard the station revealed a number of areas of harm to NICER’s thermal shields. The shields are 500 occasions thinner than a human hair and filter out infrared, ultraviolet, and visual gentle whereas permitting X-rays to go via. They cowl every of NICER’s 56 X-ray concentrators, units of 24 nested round mirrors designed to direct X-rays into corresponding detectors. A sunshade tops every concentrator and protect meeting, with a slight hole in between. The sunshades are segmented by six inner struts, resembling a sliced pie.

The most important injury to the shields is across the dimension of a typical U.S. postage stamp. The opposite areas are nearer in dimension to pinheads. Through the station’s daytime, the injury permits daylight to achieve the detectors, saturating sensors and interfering with NICER’s measurements. The mission staff altered their daytime observing technique to mitigate the impact. The injury doesn’t affect nighttime observations.

“NICER wasn’t designed to be serviced or repaired,” mentioned Keith Gendreau, the mission’s principal investigator at Goddard. “It was put in robotically, and we function it remotely. After we determined to analyze the potential of patching the most important broken areas on the thermal shields, we needed to provide you with a technique that might use the prevailing components of the telescope and station toolkits. We could not have carried out it with out all of the assist and collaboration from our colleagues at Johnson and all through the space station program.”

The answer, in the long run, was easy. The staff designed patches, every formed like a chunk of pie, that may slide into the sunshades. A tab on the backside of every patch will flip into the space between the underside of the sunshade and the highest of the thermal protect, maintaining it in place.

Astronauts will set up 5 patches through the spacewalk. They’re going to cowl probably the most vital areas of harm and block the daylight affecting NICER’s X-ray measurements.

The restore equipment accommodates 12 patches in total, permitting for spares if wanted. Astronauts will carry the patches in a caddy, an oblong body containing two spare sunshades with the patches held inside.

“NICER would be the first X-ray telescope in orbit to be serviced by astronauts and solely the fourth science observatory to be repaired total—becoming a member of the ranks of missions like NASA’s Hubble Area Telescope,” mentioned Charles Baker, the NICER venture techniques engineer at Goddard. “It has been superb to look at the patch equipment come collectively over the past yr. NICER has taught us so many great issues in regards to the cosmos, and we’re actually trying ahead to this subsequent step of its journey.”

The NICER telescope is an Astrophysics Mission of Alternative inside NASA’s Explorers Program, which offers frequent flight alternatives for world-class scientific investigations from space using modern, streamlined, and environment friendly administration approaches throughout the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas. NASA’s Area Know-how Mission Directorate supported the SEXTANT element of the mission, demonstrating pulsar-based spacecraft navigation.