Meet NASA’s new mission: the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer or NICER (which is certainly nicer to read).
This ambitious mission aims to observe the extraordinary environments of some of the strangest objects in the observable universe – neutron stars.
Neutron stars are a type of collapsed star that is incredibly dense: squeezed within a diameter of 20 kilometres or so, a neutron star may hold up to twice the mass of our Sun.
Pictured are NICER’s X-ray concentrator optics which concentrate X-rays onto silicon detectors with the aim of probing the inner fabric of neutron stars (including the rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars).
NICER recently hitched a ride on the Dragon spacecraft as part of SpaceX’s CRS-11 commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, where it now sits in an orbiting laboratory.