Design, construction, and flight of GRATIS, a balloon-borne hard x-ray telescope

The Gamma-Ray Arc-minute Telescope Imaging System, GRATIS, is a new balloon-borne experiment designed to perform the first arc minute imaging of galactic and extra-galactic hard x-ray/soft gamma-ray sources in the 30-200 keV energy range.; Observations conducted with GRATIS can provide answers to several key problems in high energy astrophysics including: (1) the origin of both the diffuse and point source components of the gamma ray emission from the Galactic Center; (2) the physical processes responsible for the hard x-ray emission in the Coma cluster of galaxies; and (3) the nature of other unidentified point sources. This dissertation discusses the scientific motivations, outlines the experiment, discusses several aspects of the design and construction of hardware components, gives an overview of the stabilized platform, shows the expected performance and sensitivity, and discusses the results of the first flight.