Some of the hottest spots in the Sun’s atmosphere appear in the telescope’s X-ray view.

With the goal of understanding why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface, NuSTAR obtained high-energy X-ray observations of the solar corona in coordination with the July 30th suborbital sounding rocket flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) low-energy X-ray instrument.

On August 21, for about two minutes across a swath of North America, Earth's moon will pass in front of and completely block out the sun, causing a total solar eclipse. Countless people are expected to witness this rare phenomenon, the first total solar eclipse in North America in 38 years. Just this week, scientists at Caltech and JPL decided that a small space telescope will be watching with them.