By Irene Klotz
HOUSTON, June 13 | Wed Jun 13, 2012 11:00pm EDT

HOUSTON, June 13 (Reuters) - An innovative X-ray telescope blasted off aboard an unmanned air-launched rocket on Wednesday to begin a two-year mission to ferret out black holes and other high-energy celestial phenomena in space, NASA officials said.
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, nicknamed NuStar, shot toward orbit aboard a Pegasus XL rocket seconds after being released from an aircraft flying about 40,000 feet (12,200 metres) over the Pacific Ocean south of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Circling the Earth in orbit, one of the X-ray telescope's initial jobs will be to conduct a sky survey, intended to give astronomers more information about how galaxies formed.
Its technology will later be used to examine galaxy clusters, supernova explosions and certain regions of space where particles are being accelerated close to the speed of light, such as around black holes.
In studying supernovas - the exploded remains of giant stars - scientists will be looking for telltale chemical fingerprints of radioactive titanium.

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