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For the past 25 years, NASA’s flagship project Chandra X-ray Observatory which has recorded X-ray emissions from exploding stars, supermassive black holesgalaxy clusters and other exotic, high-energy pockets of our Universe, allowing scientists around the world to piece together the structure and history of our cosmos.
As part of the telescope anniversary anniversary this week, the space agency released a look at the work it does to keep the $1.5 billion spacecraft flying in. spaceand for its workforce 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 are now responsible for the telescope’s day-to-day operations. The telescope launched into space on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1999 and was put into orbit which took one third of the way to the moon. From the vantage point, Chandra helped astronomers study mysteries they didn’t even know existed when it was being built, including the intricacies of. exoplanet and dark energy.
“How much technology from 1999 is still in use today?” Douglas Swartz, a Chandra researcher, said in NASA recently statement. “We don’t use the same camera equipment, computers, or phones from that era. But one technological success – Chandra – is still going strong, and still so powerful that it can read a stop sign from 12 miles away.”
Related: Happy 25 years, Chandra! NASA celebrates with 25 stunning images from its flagship X-ray observatory
The mission, which was first conceived in the last five years and then extended to at least 10, is still ten years old. The enduring value is no accident, according to the mission team, which has automated aspects of the observatory to improve its efficiency. After Chandra’s budget was cut in 1992, the mission underwent a major restructuring to eliminate planned servicing and upgrades by visiting astronauts and minimize changes to its science output. “There were a lot of excitement and a lot of challenges – but we met them and overcame them,” project engineer David Hood, who joined the Chandra development effort in 1988, said in the statement.
“The field of high-power X-ray astronomy was still relatively young, it was 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. “First, we had to build the necessary tools to test, analyze and refine the hardware.”
Marshall renovated and expanded its X-ray Calibration Facility in Alabama to accommodate the Chandra instruments and tested critical hardware in a space-like environment—efforts that, years later, paved the way for the James Webb Space Telescopewho was appointed as the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The mission team now closely monitors the telescope’s position in orbit and the efficiency of its key instruments, such as the thermal insulation on the exterior, which has, unsurprisingly, degraded. time thanks to the hard space environment, prevent the telescope from staring in one direction for too long. Operating the telescope is now more complicated, scientists insist observation efficiency is still as high as it was at the beginning of the mission.
“Chandra is still a workhorse, but it needs to be handled more delicately,” Jodi Turk, a thermal analyst at the organization. Marshall Space Flight Centersaid in the statement.
The iconic telescope’s 25th anniversary is bittersweet for many astronomers, who fear the telescope will be shut down prematurely after NASA in its fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, released in March, cut Chandra funding by 40 percent. due to budget pressures – from $68.3 million in 2023 to $41.1 million for next year, and with further drops after 2026 that will reduce its funding to just $5.2 million by 2029. The loss of telescopes would be an “extinction level” event Chandra for US X-ray astronomy, no other telescope matches or surpasses Chandra’s capabilities. More than 100 astronomers continue to urge NASA to review its decision through the “Save Chandra” coalition, arguing that the observatory has had stable operating costs for decades and still has a decade of life left.
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Yesterday (July 23), a NASA committee tasked with exploring ways to reduce Chandra’s operating costs came to the conclusion that there is no way to continue operating the observatory at the reduced funding proposed by NASA, SpaceNews. reported. The committee also outlined three options that would keep Chandra operating at reduced capabilities, such as limiting its observing programs to those with synergies with other telescopes, but all three possibilities would require higher budgets than suggested by NASA.
NASA is currently reviewing these options and aims to announce its plans for changes to Chandra in mid-September.
