The space agency's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array is slated to launch June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

After months of delay, NASA's newest space telescope is just two weeks away from launching on an ambitious mission to seek out the universe's black holes and investigate their mysterious origins.

The space agency'sNuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array(NuSTAR) is slated to launch June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The X-ray space telescope will ride into orbit on a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences, which is designed to launch in midair from a rocket-carrying aircraft. The mission has been awaiting launch since March, when NASA delayed its liftoff pending a review of the rocket.

NuSTAR will studyhow black holes formand grow, and how these processes affect their host galaxies, said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of the NuSTAR mission at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif.

"It's the very first telescope to focus high-energy X-rays," Harrison told reporters today (May 30) in a news briefing. "This will enable NuSTAR to study some of the hottest, densest and most energetic phenomena in the universe, for exampleblack holesand explosions of massive stars."

NuSTAR will examine these objects with unprecedented sensitivity by studying light in the high-energy, short-wavelength X-ray range. Images beamed back from NuSTAR will be 10 times sharper than current X-ray observatories in orbit, Harrison said.

"It's opening up a new window on the universe," said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "Although we are going into this mission with many scientific questions, like all of our NASA missions, we're going to find unexpected things out there that will lead us to questions and answers that we aren't even anticipating at this time." [Gallery: NASA's Black Hole Hunting Space Telescope]

NuSTAR was originally scheduled to launch in March, but was delayed after NASA decided more time was needed to review software on the Pegasus XL rocket.

The delay meant that the mission, which carried an initial price tag of about $165 million, increased by several million dollars, or a few percent, Hertz said. NuSTAR's science missions, however, were not impacted by the extra time required for the rocket's software review.

NuSTAR will examine the innermost regions of black holes, where hot material is accelerated close to the speed of light, boosting emissions into the high-energy X-ray range, Harrison explained.

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NASA's NuSTAR telescope will hunt black holes