For 25 years, NASA’s flagship Chandra X-ray Observatory recorded X-ray emissions from exploded stars, supermassive black holesgalaxy clusters and other exotic, high-energy regions of our universe, allowing scientists around the world to piece together the structure and history of our cosmos.
In the telescope frame birthday celebrations This week, the space agency released a behind-the-scenes look at the work it takes to keep the $1.5 billion spacecraft flying. spaceand its staff of engineers, technicians, analysts and designers, many of whom have been involved with the mission since its inception decades ago.
The Chandra telescope was first proposed NASA in 1976, and funding and preliminary work began a year later. The effort was led by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts, which is also now responsible for the telescope’s day-to-day operations. The telescope was launched into space aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1999 and was placed in an orbit that took it a third of the way to the moonIn his view, Chandra has helped astronomers study mysteries they didn’t even know existed when it was built, including the intricacies of exoplanets And dark energy.
“How much of the technology from 1999 is still being used today?” Chandra researcher Douglas Swartz said in a recent NASA interview. statement“We don’t use the same camera equipment, computers or phones we used to. But one technological achievement – Chandra – is still with us, and still so powerful that it can read a stop sign from 12 miles away.”
Related: Happy 25th Birthday, Chandra! NASA Celebrates With 25 Stunning Images From Its Flagship X-ray Observatory
The mission, originally designed to last five years and later extended to at least 10 years, still has a decade of life ahead of it. That longevity is no accident, according to the mission team, which has automated some aspects of the observatory to improve its efficiency. After Chandra’s budget was cut in 1992, the mission was significantly restructured to eliminate scheduled maintenance and upgrades by visiting astronauts while minimizing changes to its science output. “There’s been a lot of excitement and a lot of challenges, but we’ve embraced them and overcome them,” project engineer David Hood, who joined the Chandra development effort in 1988, said in the statement.
A shiny spaceship rests in the white cargo bay of a space shuttle with a large swath of land in the background.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, the longest cargo ever carried into space aboard the Space Shuttle, seen in Columbia’s payload bay before being tilted upward for release and deployment on July 23, 1999. (Photo credit: Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“The field of high-power X-ray astronomy was still relatively young, and it wasn’t just a matter of building a revolutionary observatory,” Martin Weisskopf, who led Chandra’s scientific development starting in the late 1970s, said in the statement. “We first had to build the tools needed to test, analyze and refine the hardware.”
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Marshall renovated and expanded its X-ray calibration facility in Alabama to accommodate Chandra’s instruments and test key hardware in a space-like environment – efforts that years later paved the way for testing the James Webb Space Telescopewhich was designed as a successor to the The Hubble Space Telescope.
Technicians in clean overalls operate a large machine in a circular door that stretches several meters.
A 1997 photo of engineers at the X-ray Calibration Facility—now called the X-ray and Cryogenics Facility—at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, integrating Chandra’s high-resolution camera with the mirror assembly inside a 24-foot-diameter vacuum chamber. (Image credit: NASA)
The mission team is now closely monitoring the telescope’s position in orbit and the effectiveness of its key instruments, such as the thermal insulation of its exterior, which has unsurprisingly degraded over the years. time due to the harsh space environment, preventing the telescope from looking in one direction for too long. Although the use of the telescope has become more complicated, scientists insist The observation efficiency remained as high as at the beginning of the mission.
“Chandra is still a workhorse, but it needs gentler handling,” said Jodi Turk, a thermal analyst at Marshall Space Flight Centersaid in the statement.
The iconic telescope’s 25th anniversary is a bittersweet moment for many astronomers, who fear the telescope could be shut down prematurely after NASA, in its proposed budget for fiscal year 2025, released in March, cut Chandra’s funding by 40% due to budget pressures — from $68.3 million in 2023 to $41.1 million next year, with further cuts after 2026 that reduce its funding to just $5.2 million by 2029. The loss of the Chandra telescope would be an “extinction-level” event for U.S. X-ray astronomy, with no other telescope matching or exceeding Chandra’s capabilities. More than a hundred astronomers continue to urge NASA to reconsider its decision through a “Save Chandra” coalition, arguing that the observatory has had stable operating costs over the past few decades and still has a decade of life left.
Yesterday (July 23), a NASA committee charged with studying ways to reduce Chandra’s operational costs concluded that there was no way to continue operating the observatory with the reduced funding NASA had proposed, SpaceNews reported. reportedThe committee also presented three options that would allow Chandra to continue operating with reduced capabilities, such as limiting its observing programs to those that have synergies with other telescopes, but all three would require budgets larger than those proposed by NASA.
NASA is currently studying these options and plans to announce its modification plans for Chandra in mid-September.
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