WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

Inside the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, scientists and engineers begin initial inspections of the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). The instrument will be delivered to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo carrier on the company’s 11th commercial resupply services mission to the space station. NICER will study neutron stars through soft X-ray timing. NICER will enable rotation-resolved spectroscopy of the thermal and non-thermal emissions of neutron stars in the soft X-ray band with unprecedented sensitivity, probing interior structure, the origins of dynamic phenomena and the mechanisms that underlie the most powerful cosmic particle accelerators known