For the past 25 years, NASA’s flagship Chandra X-ray Observatory 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 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 to 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 financing and preliminary work began a year later. The endeavor 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 shot into space aboard the space shuttle columbia in 1999 and was placed into an orbit that took it a third of the way to The moon. From its vantage point, Chandra has helped astronomers study mysteries they didn’t even know existed when it was built, including the ins and outs of exoplanets and dark energy.
“How much technology from 1999 is still in use today?” Douglas Swartz, a Chandra researcher, said in a recent NASA release 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 it’s still so powerful it can read a stop sign from 12 miles away.”
Connected: Happy 25th Anniversary, Chandra! NASA is celebrating with 25 breathtaking images from the world’s leading X-ray observatory
The mission, originally designed to last five years and then extended to at least 10, still has a decade to live. The lasting value is no accident, according to the mission team, which is automating aspects of the observatory to improve its efficiency. After Chandra’s budget was cut in 1992, the mission was drastically restructured to eliminate planned servicing and upgrades by visiting astronauts while minimizing changes to its science output. “There was 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 so relatively young, it wasn’t just a matter of building a revolutionary observatory,” Martin Weiskopf, who led Chandra’s scientific development in the late 1970s, said in the statement. “First, we had to build the tools needed to test, analyze and refine the hardware.”
Marshall renovated and expanded its X-ray Calibration Facility in Alabama to accommodate Chandra’s instruments and test key hardware in a space environment—efforts that years later paved the way for testing the James Webb Space Telescopewhich is designed as a successor to Hubble Space Telescope.
The mission team is now closely monitoring the telescope’s position in orbit and the performance of its key instruments, such as the thermal insulation on its exterior, which has not surprisingly deteriorated over time thanks to the harsh space environment, which prevents the telescope from looking in one direction for too long. While working with the telescope became more complex, scientists insist the surveillance efficiency remains as high as it was at the beginning of the mission.
“Chandra is still a workhorse, but it needs gentler handling,” Jody Turk, thermal analyst at Marshall Space Flight Centerthe statement said.
The iconic telescope’s 25th anniversary is bittersweet for many astronomers, who worry the telescope will be shut down prematurely after NASA cut Chandra funding by 40% in its fiscal 2025 budget proposal released in March. percent due to budget pressures, from $68.3 million in 2023 to $41.1 million next year, and with further declines 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 X-ray astronomy in the US, with no other telescope to match or surpass Chandra’s capabilities. More than 100 astronomers continue to push for NASA to reconsider its decision through the Save Chandra Coalition, arguing that the observatory has had stable operating costs in recent decades and still has a decade of life left.
Yesterday (July 23), a NASA committee tasked with studying ways to reduce operating costs for Chandra concluded that there is no way to keep the observatory running under the reduced funding proposed by NASA, SpaceNews reported. The committee also outlined three options that would keep Chandra operating with reduced capabilities, such as limiting observing programs to those that have synergies with other telescopes, but all three options would require budgets higher than NASA’s proposed.
NASA is currently reviewing these options and aims to announce its plans for changes to Chandra in mid-September.
