The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER): Future X-ray Astrophysics from the International Space Station
Abstract
In April 2013, NASA announced the selection of its newest planned high-energy astrophysics mission, the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), expected to launch in late 2016. As a successor to the now-decommissioned but highly productive Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, NICER offers capabilities that will appeal to a large community of prospective users. We present an overview of the NICER mission, its core science agenda, and a brief discussion of NICER's anticipated contributions across an array of X-ray astrophysics investigations, enabled by a proposed Guest Observer program. NICER is designed to probe the exotic interiors of neutron stars, revealing the fundamental physics of dense matter that exists nowhere else in nature, a longstanding unsolved problem. NICER's key approach consists of inferring neutron star masses and radii through time-resolved soft X-ray spectroscopy of pulsars with millisecond spin periods. In addition to exploring neutron star structure, NICER will study dynamic phenomena powered by accretion and strong gravity, and the extreme physics of pulsar magnetospheres, perhaps the most powerful cosmic particle accelerators known. NICER is particularly timely given the tremendous rate of millisecond-pulsar discovery enabled by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray telescope. NICER brings together high-heritage technologies -- such as grazing-incidence foil optics and silicon drift detectors -- in an innovative configuration, and exploits established infrastructure on the International Space Station to offer a low-risk, highly capable instrument to the X-ray astrophysics community. NICER's unique combination of photon time-tagging precision, energy resolution, and sensitivity in the soft X-ray (0.2-12 keV) band represents both a novel capability for studying neutron stars and exploration of new discovery space in time-domain astrophysics.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #223
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014AAS...22321206A