Ten years ago, July 23, 1999, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia and deployed into orbit. Chandra has doubled the expectancy of its original 5-year mission and ushered in an unprecedented decade of discovery for the high-energy universe.
With its ability to create high-resolution X-ray images, Chandra enables astronomers to investigate phenomena as diverse as comets, black holes, dark matter, and dark energy.
“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, Alabama.
The science that has been generated by Chandra — both on its own and in conjunction with other telescopes in space and on the ground — has had a widespread impact on 21st century astrophysics. Chandra has provided the strongest evidence that dark matter must exist. It has confirmed independently the existence of dark energy and made spectacular images of titanic explosions produced by matter swirling toward supermassive black holes.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Chandra, three new versions of classic Chandra images will be released during the next 3 months. These images, the first of which is available July 23, provide new data and a more complete view of objects that Chandra observed in earlier stages of its mission. The image being released today is of E0102-72, the spectacular remains of an exploded star.
The next image will be released in August to highlight the anniversary when Chandra opened up for the first time and gathered light on its detectors. The third image will be released during “Chandra’s First Decade of Discovery” symposium in Boston, which begins September 22.
“I am extremely proud of the tremendous team of people who worked so hard to make Chandra a success,” said Harvey Tananbaum, director of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It has taken partners at NASA, industry, and academia to make Chandra the crown jewel of high-energy astrophysics.”
Tananbaum 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, and was not designed to be serviced after it was deployed.
