Abstract
The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne soft gamma-ray telescope. Its compact design uses cross-strip germanium detectors, allowing for wide-field imaging with excellent efficiency from 0.2-10 MeV. Additionally,the Compton imaging principle employed by NCT provides polarimetric sensitivity to several MeV. NCT is optimized for the study of astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission. A ten-detector instrument participated in the 2010 balloon campaign in Alice Springs, Australia, in order to conduct observations of the Galactic Center Region. Unfortunately, a launch accident caused major damage to the payload, and no flight was possible. We discuss the design, calibration, and performance of the instrument as well as prospects for its future. © 2010 SPIE.