NASA Celebrates Chandra X-ray Observatory's 10th Anniversary
In the ten years since NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was deployed into orbit, it has supplied an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the universe, providing astounding images of beauty and enabling astronomers to conduct more detailed studies of black holes, supernovas, comets, and dark matter. The Chandra mirrors, the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed, enable it to detect and image X-ray sources that are billions of light years away.
Launched on July 23, 1999 aboard the space shuttle Columbia, Chandra provides astronomers with a more robust tool with which to detect invisible wavelengths of light – microwave radiation from the Big Bang, infrared radiation from proto-planetary disks around stars, and X-rays from explosions produced by black holes.
"Chandra's discoveries are truly astonishing and have made dramatic changes to our understanding of the universe and its constituents," said Martin Weisskopf, Chandra project scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Harvey Tananbaum, director of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and Nobel Prize winner Riccardo Giacconi originally proposed Chandra to NASA in 1976. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra is in a highly elliptical orbit that takes it almost one third of the way to the moon. It was not designed to be serviced after it was deployed.
In celebration of ten years of scientific discovery made possible with the Chandra Observatory, three new versions of classic Chandra images will be released during the next three months. These images provide new data and a more complete view of objects that Chandra observed in earlier stages of its mission. The first image released is of E0102-72, the debris of a very massive star that exploded in the neighboring galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud. Additional images will be released in August and September.