Credit: NASA/SAO/CXC
Chandra's Silver Jubilee
Twenty-five years ago, on July 23, 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia carried aloft in its payload bay an extraordinary instrument, NASA's third "Great Observatory", the Chandra X-ray Observatory. After being released from Columbia, Chandra's Inertial Upper Stage propelled the observatory to its final orbit, a highly elliptical path taking it a third of the way to the moon. Chandra's complement of instruments include the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), the High Resolution Camera (HRC), and the Low Energy and High Energy Tranmission Grating Spectrometers (LETGS and HETGS, respectively), but its real claim to fame is its exquisite X-ray mirror assembly, the finest ever flown. Chandra's mirrors and cameras are capable of distinguishing objects separated by only one-half arcsecond, which the equivalent to reading a stop sign at a distance of twelve miles (assuming the stop sign was emitting X-rays). No other X-ray observatory can match the high-resolution images that Chandra can obtain
During the past 25 years, Chandra has observed every type of X-ray emitting object, from planets, normal stars, black holes, neutron stars and other compact objects, to galaxies and galaxy clusters, and has measured the hot wreckage from stellar explosions and galaxy collisions, and probed the mysterious dark matter which makes up much of the cosmos. The images above
shows a collection of 25 new space images celebrating Chandra. Starting from the upper left and going from left to right, the Chandra images show the Crab Nebula, Orion Nebula, The Eyes Galaxies, Cat's Paw Nebula, Milky Way's Galactic Center, M16, Bat Shadow, NGC 7469, Virgo Cluster, WR 124, G21.5-0.9, Centaurus A, Cassiopeia A, NGC 3532, NGC 6872, Hb 5, Abell 2125, NGC 3324, NGC 1365, MSH 15-52, Arp 220, Jupiter, NGC 1850, MACS J0035, SN 1987A.
Astronomers hope to have access to Chandra's unique imaging and spectrometric capabilities for years to come.
Published: July 29, 2024
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 05-Aug-2024 14:47:04 EDT