44

August 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

AS
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evolutions in science are triggered by new instruments more predictably

than by new theories. With NASA poised to launch its $1.5 billion Chandra X-ray
Observatory (formerly the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, or AXAF) in late
July, a revolution is about to begin in high-energy astronomy. For researchers who

study cosmic X-ray emissions, the leap from the last major X-ray satellite to Chandra is comparable to that from a large ground-based reflector to the Hubble Space Telescope.
X-ray astronomy reveals the universe at energies 1,000 times higher than optical astronomy.
Its a relatively new science and, as such, its a
long way behind optical astronomy. Todays best
X-ray telescopes are less capable than a 15-inch
backyard telescope. Really! They have smaller
collecting areas and poorer angular resolution.
The best X-ray images obtained to date have resolved details only as small as 5 arcseconds
across, though 1 arcminute is more typical. Any
decent backyard scope will show features as
small as 1 arcsecond on a good night. And, except in a few special cases, X-ray detectors have

Schmidt telescopes in California and Australia

show more than a billion objects, exceeding the
Rosat count 10,000 times over. Clearly X-ray astronomy has a long way to go to catch up!
Fortunately the field has been on fast forward since 1962, when an experiment aboard a
sounding rocket detected the first X-ray signal
from beyond the solar system. When the first Xray satellite, Uhuru, flew in 1970, the angular resolution of its onboard telescope was worse than
that of the naked eye. Only eight years later the
optics aboard NASAs Einstein Observatory offered resolution comparable to that of Galileos

NASAS CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY:

discriminated only about seven colors in a

swath of the X-ray spectrum as wide as the visible-light band. Imagine how little wed understand about stars, nebulae, and galaxies if our
optical telescopes could see spectral details no
finer than the colors of the rainbow!
Of course, a backyard telescope cant see Xrays at all. You have to get above the atmosphere
to do that. This explains why X-ray astronomy
is so young it literally had to wait for the
Space Age before it could take off.
The most thorough search for celestial X-ray
sources ever made the Rntgensatellit (Rosat)
all-sky survey revealed about 100,000 emitters. This sounds like a lot, but if optical telescopes could see only the brightest 100,000 stars
they would stop at 9th magnitude, barely 20
times fainter than the unaided eye can see on a
clear, moonless night. Wed miss Pluto, quasars,
the Crab pulsar, and Cepheid variable stars in
the Large Magellanic Cloud, without which we
would be clueless as to the distance scale of the
universe. In contrast, all-sky surveys made with

telescope of 1610. Now, just 20 years later, Chandra is about to beat the traditional 1-arcsecond
limit of large ground-based telescopes, a breakthrough that took optical astronomy 380 years.
Although in the long march of history X-ray astronomy has moved pretty fast, Chandras coming
has felt pretty slow to those of us involved. The
concept originated with a May 1970 call to NASA
to build a large orbiting X-ray telescope. Astronomers Riccardo Giacconi and Herbert Gursky
made this bold proposal even before Uhurus successful launch, when only 20 cosmic X-ray sources
were known. This was too much for NASA at the
time, but it led directly to Einstein, the first X-ray
telescope to make images, and now to Chandra.
AXAF itself was first proposed to NASA in
1976, and though preliminary design work began
then, budget problems and the Challenger tragedy
delayed construction. Congress finally gave the
mission a green light in 1988, but more budget
trouble led to a radical downsizing in 1992. AXAF
was split into two smaller spacecraft, shedding two
mirrors, two scientific instruments, and 10,000

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY CENTER

DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY

The universe contains much more than meets the eye. Need proof? A visible-light image (left)
of galaxy cluster Abell 1367 shows a gaggle of ordinary-looking spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars separated by empty space. But a false-color X-ray view (right) from the now-defunct
Rosat spacecraft reveals that the empty space between the galaxies is actually filled with
gas at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees.

kilograms (22,000 pounds) in the process.

The second satellite, which would have carried a powerful X-ray spectrometer, was
sacrificed in yet another round of budget
cuts the following year, prompting some to
call the mission ax-half. As compensation, NASA will fly a scaled-down version
of the spectrometer on Japans Astro E
mission, scheduled to begin in February
2000 (see page 56).
Despite the cuts, Chandra has retained
most of the AXAF concepts original ca-

pabilities. The reduction in collecting

area of its optics has been largely offset
by the use of high-density iridium coatings rather than the gold coatings originally planned. And, compensating for the
loss of data from the canceled instruments, NASA will place Chandra into an
orbit that will increase the observing efficiency of the instruments that remain.
Now Chandra is at last ready to take
its place in orbit as NASAs next Great
Observatory, following the Hubble Space

Telescope and Compton Gamma Ray

Observatory, launched in 1990 and 1991,
respectively. These are distinguished
ranks. How does Chandra qualify to
stand among them? By producing highresolution (12-arcsecond) images and
moderate-resolution (0.1 percent) spectra. Compared with earlier X-ray observatories, these capabilities earn Chandra
the adjective revolutionary.
Size Does Matter
Chandra is a big satellite. While previous
X-ray telescopes could fit in your living
room (Rosat, for example, was about 3
meters long), Chandra is 13.8 meters (45
feet) long, as big as a moving van. And, as
in a moving van, most of this length is
taken up by empty space. It has to be, because of the nature of X-rays. These highenergy photons can bounce off a mirror
only if they come in almost parallel to its
surface. At angles of incidence larger than
a degree or so they are simply absorbed.*
Since an X-ray reflector is limited to
*Some clever tricks with interference coatings can
allow X-rays in a narrow band of wavelengths to
reflect at normal incidence. The spectacular images
of the Sun from the Transition Region And Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite show how well this
can work (S&T: September 1998, page 20).

CHANDRAS ANATOMY
Aspect camera
stray-light shade

Sunshade door

Spacecraft module

Solar-cell array (2)

This illustration identifies the main elements of

the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Formerly known as
the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF),
the satellite is nearly 14 meters (45 feet) long and
weighs 4,620 kilograms (10,160 pounds); its twin
solar-cell panels span nearly 20 meters.
High-resolution
mirror assembly (HRMA)

Thrusters (4)
(105 lb. each)

46

August 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Antenna

Telescope

CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY CENTER

power active galaxies. The all-important

iron lines appear at a wavelength near 2
angstroms, corresponding to an energy
of 6.7 kiloelectron volts (keV). This is a
factor of three below Rosats short-wavelength cutoff, so Chandras focal length is
three times longer a full 10 meters.

The Chandra telescope will be the first to put X-ray imaging of the cosmos on a par with visiblelight imaging. At left is a Rosat image of the center of M87, the elliptical galaxy at the heart of the
Virgo Cluster. At a resolution of about 5 arcseconds, the galaxy appears to have a double nucleus.
The 12-arcsecond-resolution Chandra view simulated at right reveals the nucleus (at lower left)
and the narrow, lumpy jet of plasma known from earlier visible-light and radio observations.

grazing angles, it cant send light back the

way it came but merely bends its path
slightly. This means that the light has to
travel quite some distance to reach the
focal point, as compared with the size of
the mirror itself. In telescope terms this
means that Chandras 1.2-meter-diameter
outer mirror has an f/ratio (focal length
divided by diameter) of 8.3. This is similar to optical reflectors, but such instruments can fold the light back with a secondary mirror to keep the telescope
compact. Chandra cant.

The shorter the wavelength (the higher the energy) of the X-rays, the smaller
the grazing angles required for reflection,
and so the larger the f/ratio. A key goal
for Chandra is to capture images of
quasars and clusters of galaxies in the
light of the iron atoms K-shell emissionline complex, a telltale sign of energetic
activity. If we can study these spectral
features in detail something not possible before Chandra we should learn
much about the massive black holes
whose gravitational energy is believed to

Riding High
Chandras orbit is big too. Its apogee, or
farthest distance from Earth, is 140,000
kilometers (87,000 miles), well beyond
the 36,000-km geostationary altitude of
communication satellites and fully onethird of the way to the Moon. Its perigee
(closest approach to Earth) is 10,000 km,
far above the Space Shuttles maximum
altitude of 600 km. (For a personal look
at how Chandra will get into this unusual orbit, see astronaut Steven Hawleys
companion article on page 54.)
Keplers second law of planetary motion, which holds that the imaginary line
between a planet and the Sun sweeps out
equal areas in equal times, applies to
satellites in orbit around the Earth too.
This means that in its highly elongated
orbit Chandra will spend most of its
time near apogee. At this dizzying height
the Earth appears as a disk less than 5 in
diameter. So Chandra can observe virtually any target in the sky without the

X-rays are absorbed by ordinary mirrors, but at very small angles of incidence they can be reflected. The Chandra telescopes grazing-incidence
optics are the largest and most powerful ever built, focusing X-rays from
a point source into an image only 12 arcsecond in diameter.
S&T
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10
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Incoming
X-rays

Doubly reflected X-rays

Focal surface
Integrated scienceinstrument module (ISIM)

Four nested paraboloids

Four nested hyperboloids

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope August 1999

47

Perigee

Apogee

S&T DIAGRAM

Keplers 2nd Law:

The line between a satellite and
the planet it orbits sweeps out
equal areas in equal times.

Equal
areas
Chandras orbital motion in 4 hours
near perigee and apogee

pesky Earth blocking its view for about a

half hour every 90 minutes, as it does for
Hubble and other satellites in much
lower orbits. This is particularly important for observations of X-ray binaries,
whose emissions vary on time scales of
hours as the two stars whirl around their
common center of mass.
Not having Earth in the way gives Chandra a productivity boost too, which is why
this orbit was chosen during the budget
crisis of 1992 (the more science NASA
could squeeze out of every dollar spent on
the project, the better). Ground-based telescopes can quickly switch from one target
to another, but most space telescopes slew
around the sky excruciatingly slowly. Like
Hubble, Chandra slews at about the same

Unlike most space telescopes, which stay relatively close to home, the Chandra X-ray
Observatory will orbit the Earth in a highly elongated path that carries it one-third
of the way to the Moon every 64.2 hours. Thanks to Keplers second law of orbital motion, illustrated here, the observatory will spend most of each orbit
near apogee. From this vantage the Earth blocks only a tiny fraction of the
sky, enabling the telescope to spend some 80 percent of its time productively.

rate as a clocks minute

hand, taking at least a half
hour to point from one side of
the sky to the other. Thus when
Earth blocks Hubbles view or
that of any other satellite only a few hundred kilometers up theres not enough
time to slew to another target in the opposite celestial hemisphere, snap an image or
record a spectrum, and then return to the
original target in time for the view to clear
again. Whereas low-orbiting telescopes lose
almost half their potential observing time
as a result of this, ultra-efficient Chandra
will spend nearly 80 percent of its time collecting scientific data.
The downside to Chandras high orbit is
that it cant be reached by the shuttle, so
instruments cant be repaired if they fail or
be replaced with more advanced designs
as they age. Back in 1992 this was seen as a
plus, because it eliminated the need to
fund second-generation instruments for
the spacecraft. Today it means we must
have faith that weve designed, built, and

tested the telescope well enough to ensure

that it performs as intended throughout
its five-year mission.
Beautiful Mirrors
What makes Chandra advanced? Mainly
its X-ray-reflective mirrors, produced at
Hughes-Danbury Optical Systems* in Connecticut and assembled at Eastman-Kodak
in New York. The high quality of Chandras four sets of nested cylindrical mirrors
distinguishes the telescope from all other
X-ray observatories past, present, or
planned. Thanks to their excellent figure,
the optics concentrate more than half the
photons from a point source into a circle of
radius 12 arcsecond. In terms of area, this
circle (called the beam) is 1100 as big as the
one that was formed by Rosat, the X-ray
observatory with the best angular resolution so far; 11000 as big as that of the European Space Agencys forthcoming X-ray
Multi-mirror Mission (XMM); and 110,000 as
* Now Raytheon Optical Systems, Inc.

CHANDRAS ASSEMBLY, 199198

RAYTHEON OPTICAL SYSTEMS, INC.

RAYTHEON OPTICAL SYSTEMS, INC.

CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY CENTER

1: One of the Chandra Observatorys eight cylindrical mirror blanks undergoes grinding and polishing to its final paraboloidal figure at Hughes Danbury (now Raytheon) Optical Systems. 2: An
other mirror receives a final visual check before getting coated with highly reflective iridium. 3: A
Kodak engineer inspects Chandras nested paraboloidal mirrors before aligning and mating them
with the nested hyperboloids visible in the background. The mirrors are 0.8 meter long and range
in diameter from 0.6 to 1.2 meters. During the extremely precise assembly process an unexpected
0.1 Celsius rise in room temperature caused by heat from the ambient fluorescent lighting
actually distorted the figure of one mirror measurably but not enough to affect its performance
significantly. 4: Technicians work on the spacecraft module, which contains the computers, elec48

August 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

big as that of Japans Advanced Satellite for

Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA), the
X-ray mission with the best spectral resolution so far. A small beam area makes a telescope more sensitive, because large beams
fill up with unwanted sky brightness that
dilutes the signal from the target.
Making mirrors this good was no easy
task. The surface had to be polished to a
level of smoothness thats nothing short
of astonishing. A rough patch only 10
angstroms high 1500 the wavelength of
visible light would look like a mountain to a 2-angstrom X-ray and would
scatter it way off course.
Even more difficult than achieving the
required smoothness was making each of
the cylindrical mirror shells perfectly
round and then figuring them to the
proper paraboloidal or hyperboloidal
curves needed to bring X-rays to a sharp
focus. The key to getting good figures was
to start with strong shells 2.5 centimeters
thick so they wouldnt distort too easily
and then to support them very carefully
during grinding and polishing. The hardest part of all was to know when we had
succeeded. Measuring the exact shape of
the mirrors to the necessary level of precision required us to build a new calibration facility full of special-purpose devices
at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center.

CHANDRA WILL UNEARTH ABOUT 1,000

NEW X-RAY SOURCES IN EVERY PATCH OF
SKY THE SIZE OF THE FULL MOON.
The Power of Resolution
Chandras tiny beam gives the telescope
formidable sensitivity and resolution, both
angular and spectral. Chandra can observe
for a million seconds (nearly two weeks)
before background emissions start to interfere with the signal from a point source,
letting the telescope reach more than 10
times (2.5 magnitudes) fainter than Rosat.
An analysis of the ripples in the Rosat
background suggests Chandra will unearth
about 1,000 new X-ray sources in every
patch of sky the size of the full Moon.
What will these objects be? An obvious
guess would be distant quasars and active
galactic nuclei, but you never know.
Dong-Woo Kim (Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics) and I were recently surprised to find numerous Rosat
sources with no visible counterparts on
Palomar Observatory Sky Survey images,
even though all types of known X-ray
sources should have been bright enough
to show up. As they say on Star Trek, Its

something weve never encountered before. We suspect they may be free-floating neutron stars that are not producing
intense pulsar radiation but are glowing
gently as interstellar material rains down
onto them. Is this really what we found?
Chandra will return such precise positions that it will pinpoint exactly where
to aim Hubble or large ground-based
telescopes to look for faint visible counterparts to these X-ray sources, and then
well know. I was lucky enough to be
awarded a small amount of observing
time with Chandra to do just that.
Sharp images allow us to see not only
faint objects but also fine details. I have
heard some astronomers dismiss mere
imaging and insist that only spectroscopy
can lead to a real physical understanding
of how celestial objects work. I agree that
spectra are powerful, but images can be
powerful too. Like most S&T readers, I
grew up looking at ground-based pictures and marveling at the mysteries they
TRW, INC.

TRW, INC.

TRW, INC.

TRW, INC.

TRW, INC.

tronics, thrusters, and other systems necessary to operate the telescope. 5:

Chandra begins to take shape as the towering X-ray telescope (shown
aperture-end down) is lowered toward the spacecraft module. 6: Engineers
from Ball Aerospace and TRW prepare Chandras Integrated Science Instrument Module for mating to the aft end of the X-ray telescope. 7: In July
1998 the completed and fully functional Chandra X-ray Observatory spent
several weeks in a giant vacuum chamber getting alternately baked and
frozen to test its response to the conditions it will encounter in space. Several problems were found and fixed.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

7
Sky & Telescope August 1999

49

SPACE IMAGING

These satellite images of San Francisco, California, illustrate why angular resolution is crucial to
understanding what we see. The left-hand image, with a resolution of 100 meters, shows us the
general layout of the San Francisco Bay area and provides a context for the close-ups that follow. The middle image (10-meter resolution) reveals an odd assortment of geometric patterns.
Only when we see the right-hand image (1-meter resolution) do we realize that were looking
at San Franciscos airport. Equating the first two images to the views from past X-ray telescopes, the last image indicates the improvement offered by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

held. Now, when looking at images from

the Hubble Space Telescope, I feel as if
Im cheating and looking up the answers
in the back of the book. Hubble images
reveal cosmic structure on every scale,
and many of the objects they show also
happen to be X-ray sources. Surely these
objects wont lose all their structure when
we look at them with Chandra!

something much bigger. For example,

the illumination of the 5-light-year-wide
Crab Nebula remained a mystery until
the nature of the 14-km-diameter pulsar
at its center was understood. Chandra
will resolve 100 times more detail than
we have ever seen before at X-ray wavelengths. It will surely find extraordinary
things.

CHANDRA WILL RESOLVE 100 TIMES MORE

DETAIL THAN WE HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE
AT X-RAY WAVELENGTHS.
Its impossible to show examples of
high-resolution X-ray images of the cosmos, because we dont have any. Perhaps
a terrestrial perspective on angular resolution will help. Look at the accompanying photographs taken by spy satellites.
The gain in angular resolution from each
image to the next corresponds to Rosats
all-sky survey, Rosats sharpest imaging,
and what we expect from Chandra. The
good Rosat image shows a complex
and puzzling structure on the coast of
the bay found in the survey image. The
Chandra image the one that finally
resolves the airplane makes clear that
what we see in the moderate-resolution
view is an airport. Astrophysics can work
the same way. Sometimes the identification of a tiny object can help explain
50

August 1999 Sky & Telescope

Real Spectra at Last

In reality astronomers need both images
and spectra to understand the universe,
and Chandra delivers both. Visible-light
spectral lines come from electrons jumping between levels in the outermost
shells of an atom, where the energy
changes are on the order of a few electron volts. In contrast, X-ray line emissions come from electrons jumping between the innermost few shells (mainly
the ones called K and L) of an atom.
Here the positively charged atomic nucleus attracts the negatively charged electrons 1,000 times more strongly than in
the outer shells, so the emitted photons
have X-ray energies of order 1 keV.
Almost all the X-ray spectroscopy we
have done so far would be called broad1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

band photometry at other wavelengths. To

achieve astronomically useful spectral resolution enough to discriminate between emissions from various atoms in
various states of ionization Chandra
employs transmission gratings that can be
placed in the converging beam of X-rays
speeding from the mirrors toward the detectors. These gratings disperse the X-ray
light according to wavelength, just as gratings or prisms do in optical spectrographs.
They work like an objective prism, forming a distinct image of the object under
study (for example, a supernova remnant)
in each of its emission lines. And because
Chandras optics so tightly focus the incoming X-rays these discrete images tend
to overlap very little, yielding 100 times
the spectral resolution of ASCA at 1 keV.
Thus Chandra can tell the difference between X-rays with energies of 1,000 and
1,001 electron volts. This resolution will
allow more and fainter lines to be detected
than ever before, giving us many new ways
to measure densities, temperatures, and
motions in X-ray sources.
The Chandra gratings cover the energy
range 0.07 to 10 keV, corresponding to
wavelengths between 1 and 200 angstroms.
Thats seven times broader spectral coverage than provided by ASCA, the best Xray spectrometer now flying. To accomplish this Chandra employs two separate
instruments: the Low Energy and High
Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometers (LETGS and HETGS, respectively).
And resolution isnt their only claim to
fame; they are also extraordinarily efficient, so that when combined with Chandras large mirrors they transmit 20 to 200
times more X-ray radiation than their
predecessors on earlier satellites.
The advent of genuine X-ray spectroscopy is such a leap forward that it finds
most astronomers (including this one)
without the tools and understanding need-

Chandras transmission gratings disperse the X-rays from extended objects into a spectrum
thats actually a series of distinct images, one for each emission line. Here is a simulated X-ray
spectrum of supernova remnant N132D in the Large Magellanic Cloud, as recorded by Chandras AXAF CCD Imaging Spectrometer. In order to fit a wide span of wavelengths onto the
cameras not-so-wide detectors, the gratings split the spectrum into two strips.

stream electronics cant measure signals

that small. But a single X-ray puts about
1,000 electrons into circulation, so each
X-ray can be read out individually. More
energetic X-rays yield a bigger bunch of
electrons, too, so by measuring the total
charge of the bunch we can infer the energy of the original X-ray. For a 1-keV
photon, the result should be accurate to
within 10 percent or so.
Chandras other imager, the High Resolution Camera (HRC), offers the widest
field (31 arcminutes square) and the
highest angular resolution (12 arcsecond)
of any instrument onboard. Instead of
CCDs it employs microchannel plates,
special-purpose detectors that are sensitive across Chandras entire spectral band
and can record the arrival time of each
X-ray to the nearest 16 microseconds
essential for studies of highly variable
collapsed objects. The tradeoff is spectral
resolution; its only about a tenth as good
as that achievable with ACIS.

Because Chandra offers simultaneously

high spatial and spectral resolution, the
data it returns especially from the
CCDs will be unusually rich. For example, each photon recorded by ACIS will
give us three numbers: its right ascension
and declination (used to form an image)
and its energy (used to form a spectrum).
Such three-dimensional information is
called a data cube. Actually the ACIS
data will be four-dimensional, since each
X-ray will have a time tag too. To be correct, then, we should say we have a data
tesseract, a 4-D cube. This was true of
earlier X-ray missions, too, but none carried cameras with more than a few hundred pixels. ACIS has more than a million. Programmers at the Chandra Center
have developed special software to enable
astronomers to analyze the huge volume
of multidimensional data that will rain
down from the orbiting telescope.
Chandra in Demand
February 2, 1998, was the deadline for
astronomers worldwide to submit their
bids to use Chandra during its first year
in space. A total of 780 proposals came
in to the Chandra Center (then called
the AXAF Science Center), most of them
Chandras objective transmission gratings,
which can be swung into the telescopes optical path to disperse the incoming X-rays into
a spectrum, are marvels of technology. As
seen here, both the low-energy (foreground)
and high-energy (left) gratings consist of
four rings of dispersive elements, one for
each set of grazing-incidence mirrors. Creating the fine rules of the high-energy gratings
each just 0.2 micron wide required the
adaptation of lithography techniques used in
the production of silicon computer chips.

TRW, INC.

Data Cubes and Tesseracts

Chandra has two cameras with which to
capture the images and spectra produced
by the telescopes mirrors and gratings.
Most X-ray astronomers are used to the
point-and-shoot simplicity of earlier
missions, where there was little to think
about except the correct exposure time.
Chandra is more like a professional, fully
manual 35-mm camera with interchangeable lenses and films. Before taking every
image the user has to choose the right
equipment and make the right settings.
The AXAF CCD Imaging Spectrometer
(ACIS) employs two different types of
charge-coupled devices (CCDs), cousins
of the light-sensitive silicon chips in video
cameras and amateurs CCD imagers.
One type is especially sensitive to low-energy X-rays, while the other offers higher
spectral resolution at all energies and is
more sensitive at high X-ray energies.
X-rays and visible-light photons both
register in a CCD by knocking electrons
into the silicon conduction band of a
pixel. An optical CCD must collect large
numbers of photons in each pixel before
being read out, because each photon liberates only one electron, and the down-

JOHN HOUCK / MIT

ed to interpret the data. The existing software for modeling the spectra of high-energy sources is based on work done in the
1970s. And few of us have a very detailed
knowledge of atomic physics at X-ray energies. So the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where the data will be received and
processed, has created a tiger team to pull
together the huge number of laboratory
measurements and calculations needed to
support X-ray spectroscopy with Chandra.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope August 1999

51

in the last few days before the deadline

(astronomers put things off to the last
minute just like everyone else). Thats
substantially more than the 562 proposals that the Space Telescope Science Institute received for Hubbles first round of
observations proof that theres a great
deal of pent-up demand for a powerful
X-ray telescope. With so many proposals
jostling for precious observing time, the
time-allocation committee had to reject
five of every six. I put in three and got
half of one exactly average.
To encourage new Ph.D. recipients to
try their hand at X-ray astronomy, NASA
has instituted a postdoctoral fellowship
modeled on the highly successful and
much-coveted Hubble Fellows program.
Sixty-three newly minted astronomers
applied for the first three Chandra fellowships. The selection committee, impressed by the number of outstanding
applicants, persuaded NASA to fund two
extra fellowships. In February 1999 another six Chandra Fellows were added to
the roster from a field of 45 applicants.
The first 11 Chandra Fellows will study
starburst galaxies, clusters of galaxies, Xray binary stars, black holes, and many
other high-energy phenomena. Theyll be
joined by hundreds of other researchers
tackling everything from comets to cos-

X-ray Observatories Online

To learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and follow Julys Space Shuttle
mission to deploy it, visit the following World Wide Web sites*:
chandra.harvard.edu
snail.msfc.nasa.gov/AXAF/AXAF.html
www.trw.com/seg/sats/AXAF.html
shuttle.nasa.gov
www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-93/mission-sts-93.html

And visit these Web sites* to read more about the X-ray astronomy missions scheduled to follow Chandra (see page 56):
sci.esa.int/xmm
lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xray/astroe
constellation.gsfc.nasa.gov

52

August 1999 Sky & Telescope

X-ray Multi-mirror Mission (XMM)

Astro E
Constellation X

*Preface each address with http://

spacecraft. Only after that will its aperture

door swing open, exposing its mirrors and
scientific instruments to the X-ray sky.
Next come two weeks of calibration and a
limited number of observations of highpriority science targets. All the images and
spectra collected during this period will be
made public on the World Wide Web, creating a showcase of the most photogenic
X-ray emitters in the cosmos.
A Culmination and a Beginning
For many X-ray astronomers Chandra
represents the culmination of our careers.

WAIT TILL WE SEE THE FIRST OF CHANDRAS

CLEAN, SHARP IMAGES.THEN WE WILL
REALLY KNOW WHAT SURPRISE IS.
mology. The program awarded the most
observing time during Chandras first
year is a study of ultrahot gas in remote
clusters of galaxies. Another exciting program will be carried out by the team that
used the Italian-Dutch satellite BeppoSAX to determine the positions of several
gamma-ray bursts quickly enough for
other astronomers to detect the sources
faint afterglow in visible light (S&T: February 1998, page 32). The BeppoSAX astronomers will use Chandra to pinpoint
the locations of gamma-ray bursts with
unprecedented accuracy, probably clinching the suspected association between
these energetic eruptions and young
galaxies at immense distances.
Chandras first month in orbit will be
devoted to a thorough checkout of the

Chandra X-ray Observatory Center

NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
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Space Shuttle Home Page
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Like Hubble, it also represents the culmination of our traditional approach to

building large space telescopes. Both instruments achieve 10-fold improvements
in resolution in their respective spectral
regimes by using monolithic mirrors
whose size and weight and therefore
performance is limited by the need to
launch them already assembled aboard the
Space Shuttle. Their successors will employ new technologies, such as spacebased interferometry (in which the signals
from several small telescopes are combined to simulate the view in a much larger instrument) and lightweight, segmented
mirrors that can be launched folded up
and then exploded to their proper optical configuration once in orbit. Such X-ray
telescopes could grow as large as the 101999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

meter Keck reflectors or even larger

and produce images with milliarcsecond
or perhaps microarcsecond resolution.
Chandra also represents a beginning. It
ushers in the era of routine high-resolution X-ray imaging and, more important,
of X-ray astrophysics, since it will let us
apply the tools of physics (especially spectroscopy) to high-energy astronomy.
With Chandras order-of-magnitude
advances in angular resolution, spectral
resolution, and both at once we know
well encounter surprises. For example,
Chandra spectra will show X-ray emissions that we dont recognize, since laboratory work has covered only a few of the
spectral lines we expect to record at these
energies. And X-ray sources now thought
to be single, large objects will undoubtedly
resolve into numerous smaller ones, some
of which will likely be new types not seen
in X-rays before. For example, Hubble images revealed that the bright, O-type stars
in the Orion Trapezium are surrounded
by newly forming stars ringed by evaporating protoplanetary disks (S &T: December 1994, page 20). Since these O stars are
also bright X-ray sources, it seems safe to
predict that Chandra will find the protoplanetary disks shining in fluorescent Xrays. Will some of the other X-ray sources
detected by Chandra turn out to be solar
systems in formation too? Maybe!
But wait till we see the first of Chandras
clean, sharp images. Then we will really
know what surprise is. Well smack ourselves on the forehead and say, Of course!
How could we have been so blind?
Martin Elvis is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and
leads the science data systems group at the
Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.