First Results From The Balloon Flight Of The NCT Prototype

We flew a prototype of the Nuclear Compton Tele-scope (NCT) on a high altitude balloon from Fort Sum-ner, New Mexico on 2005 June 1. The NCT proto-type is a soft γ–ray (0.2–15MeV) telescope designed to study, through spectroscopy, imaging, and timing, as-trophysical sources of nuclear line emission and γ–ray polarization. Our program is designed to develop and test the technologies and analysis techniques crucial for the Advanced Compton Telescope satellite, while study-ing γ–ray radiation with very high spectral resolution, moderate angular resolution, and high sensitivity. The NCT prototype utilizes two, 3D imaging germanium detectors (GeDs) in a novel, ultra-compact design opti-mized for nuclear line emission (0.5–2MeV) and polar-ization in the 0.2–0.5MeV range. Our prototype flight was a critical test of the novel instrument technologies, analysis techniques, and background rejection proce-dures we have developed for high resolution Compton telescopes