Chandra team ecstatic: 'This is an absolutely tremendous day for science'
By Robyn Suriano
FLORIDA TODAY
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - It took 20 years
to get the Chandra X-Ray
Observatory from the drawing boards
to reality - a reality that makes its one of the
most exquisite pieces of technology
ever built.
On Friday, astronaut Eileen Collins and
her crew needed less than eight hours to cast
the telescope free and kick off a revolution
in X-ray astronomy.
Shuttle Columbia's astronauts sent the
telescope adrift from the ship shortly after
reaching space, achieving the main goal
of their 5-day mission. Later, Chandra was
nudged to a higher orbit by an attached
motor.
With its journey off to a flawless start,
jubilant scientists said the world's most
powerful X-ray telescope should be ready
for business in two months to probe some
of the deepest mysteries of the universe.
"This is an absolutely tremendous day
for science to have such a fabulous liftoff and
be on our way to a science mission,"
said Roger Brissenden, who manages
Chandra's control center at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Mass. "I'm absolutely thrilled."
Chandra's flight from Earth began early
Friday when Columbia blasted off from
Kennedy Space Center with Collins, NASA's
first woman commander, in charge.
The crew got down to work immediately,
preparing Chandra to leave its cradle in
the ship's cargo bay.
Glistening silver with its shiny solar
arrays wrapped tight around the telescope,
Chandra and its attached motor spanned
45-feet and weighed more than 50,000
pounds.
That made it the largest passenger ever carried by a shuttle.
Once ferried aloft, Chandra didn't stay on board long.
Around 6:30 a.m. Friday, astronaut Cady
Coleman slowly began tilting the giant
telescope out of Columbia's bay as it
lay on a moveable table.
Then the engineer and chemist pulled
a lever springing Chandra gently from the bay
at 7:47 a.m., when it sailed noiselessly
over the shuttle's windows and into the deep
black of space.
"It's so quiet, we were just amazed,"
said Coleman, who floated near Columbia's
windows snapping pictures of the telescope.
"This thing is so big you certainly know
that it's moving toward you and over the
head of the shuttle. I will tell you
there is nothing as beautiful as Chandra sailing off on
its way to work."
Meanwhile, down on Earth, Chandra's scientists
and managers were deeply moved
by the last views of their telescope.
"It was very difficult for us to observe
that without getting a lump in our throat," said
Jean Oliver, Chandra's deputy program
manager at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight
Center in Huntsville, Ala.
"So many people spent so many years of
their lives dedicated to this piece of
equipment. It has a special place in
your heart to see this thing deploy."
With the telescope drifting away, Collins
steered her spaceship to a safe distance
about 26 miles from the observatory.
Chandra then was clear to fire its attached
motor and propel itself further from
Earth.
The booster worked perfectly and hoisted
the telescope to a temporary orbit 46,000
miles from home.
It then unfurled its 25-foot solar arrays.
Soon after, the motor dropped away. The
telescope's first journey was finished
shortly after 10 a.m.
"We are just ecstatic, you couldn't ask
for anything better than what we got today,"
said Craig Staresinich, Chandra program
manager for the telescope's manufacturer,
TRW Space and Electronics Group of Redondo
Beach, Calif.
"We always prepare for the worst and
hope for the best and today we got what we
hoped for. It's the best. It was absolutely
flawless."
During the next 10 days, the telescope
is to use its own thrusters to glide into a
radically egg-shaped orbit with a high
point of 87,000 miles and a low point of 6,200
miles.
The lopsided path carries Chandra far
from the reach of NASA's shuttles if anything
should go wrong.
But it also will keep the telescope out
of Earth's radiation belts most of the time. This
will protect the observatory's sensitive
instruments and allow it to stare at objects
without blinking for 2.5 days at a time.
In doing so, Chandra packs a powerful gaze.
With vision 50 to 100 times stronger
than earlier X-ray telescopes, Chandra's could
read the letters on a stop sign from
12 miles away.
Its keen vision comes from the telescope's
eight mirrors that are the largest and
smoothest of their kind. Together, they
weigh more than one ton.
Scientists will use Chandra to study
black holes gobbling matter, stars exploding into
tiny bits and massive galaxies slamming
together in head-on collisions.
Brissenden said Chandra will be filling
the gap left unstudied currently in the
high-energy range of X-ray emissions.
In doing so, Chandra joins its cousins,
the Hubble Space Telescope and the
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, as NASA's
orbiting tools for picking apart
some of the universe's most closely
guarded secrets.
Some of Chandra's targets are to include:
Supernova,
which are the catastrophic deaths of massive stars when they
explode
and create a bubble of scalding gas called a supernova remnant. The
hot gas
emanates X-rays for thousands of years, and Chandra will study the
remnants
to see how they lead to the production of fundamental chemical
elements
in the universe.
Black
holes that gobble all gas and dust particles, creating massive
gravitational
fields and some of the most intense X-ray emissions. With its
precision
instruments, Chandra will be able to follow particles up to their final
second
before they are pulled into the center of a black hole.
Galaxy
clusters that may hoard "dark matter," unseen material that may make
up most
of the universe. Chandra's work may help scientists determine if dark
matter
really exists and what it's made of.
Scientists say the best discoveries are likely to be the ones that can't be imagined.
"Chandra will significantly advance what
people currently have been doing with
X-ray astronomy," Brissenden said. "But
I think the discoveries that Chandra will
make that we don't yet know about are
going to be the big payback."