Washington
—
Since its launch eight years ago, the
Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided
star-gazing scientists with detailed images of high-energy phenomena across the
universe such as
black holes and supernovas.
Chandra l
aunched aboard the
Space Shuttle Columbia
July 23, 1999.
The spacecraft
was named for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the first scientists to combine the fields of astronomy and
physics
. The Indian-American Nobel laureate studied the structure and evolution of the universe, and is known best for his work with white dwarfs and neutron stars.
Originally scheduled for launch
July 20, the
launch was scrubbed several times because of sensor problems and lightning storms.
Several system failures occurred both on the
pad and during the shuttle launch
. Five seconds after the shuttle launched, backup engine controllers took over when a short circuit disabled two of the three main engine controllers
. During ascent, additional liquid oxygen propellant was used to compensate for a
hydrogen leak in the third engine
, which almost caused it to redline.
After it was released from the shuttle’s cargo bay, Chandra’s
inertial upper stage also
underperformed, leaving it about 900
kilometers short of its planned highly
elliptical orbit;
it had to use its own engines to reach its destination, which was
a third of the way to the Moon.
Despite
those early obstacles,
the telescope
transmitted its first images in August
1999, and has lasted beyond its projected five-year service life
. It averages
1,000 observations a year.
Some of
Chandra’s most notable findings include revealing
distant galaxies
10 billion light years away,
proving dark energy makes up 70 percent of the universe and confirming the Hubble Constant, the measure of the rate of expansion of the universe.
Chandra was capable of delivering images with resolutions 25 times greater
than its predecessors
due to its four pairs of precisely made near-cylindrical mirrors, which were
flattened to within a few atoms of levelness.
Built by TRW Space and Electronics of Redondo Beach, Calif. – now Northrop Grumman Space Technology –
for $1.5 billion,
Chandra
is one of NASA’s “Great Observatories”
along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and the now-de
orbited
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
Chandra’s mission is managed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., with three ground stations
in California, Spain and Australia.
Mission participants include the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany.
