SATELLITE TO FLY UNDER A FAMED NAME; CAMARILLO TEACHER WON SHOT TO CHRISTEN ORBITER.

Byline: Associated Press

A new NASA science satellite carrying an X-ray telescope to explore the mysteries of black holes and other celestial phenomena has been rolled out by prime contractor TRW Inc.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, designed to detect X-ray sources billions of light years away from Earth, will be launched next spring aboard space shuttle Columbia.

``Chandra will collect X-ray emissions from the very edges of the universe, revealing the cataclysmic forces that shaped our universe - black holes, collapsing stars, exploding stars, dark matter,'' said Don Winter, an official of TRW's Space & Electronics Group in Redondo Beach.

The ceremony included a Camarillo High School science teacher who helped name the satellite after the late astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for studies of physical processes considered essential to the structure and evolution of stars.

Jatila van der Veen, a physics and astronomy teacher, said she stumbled upon a naming contest on the Internet and thought Chandrasekhar was the obvious choice. Having studied in India during 1986-87 provided more motivation.

``I've always felt a resonance with him even though I never met him,'' she said.

Van der Veen's essay noted that the name had an appropriate connotation: ``Chandra means moon in Sanskrit; it is depicted in the hand gestures of Bharata Natyam, the classical dance of South India, as a crescent moon, and is also used to indicate the passage of time as shown by the changing phases of the moon.''

Chandra is the third in a family of powerful research satellites that includes the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

Its Eastman Kodak Co.-built telescope is designed to detect X-rays, which are invisible to the eye and conventional optical telescopes and are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.

The 5-ton, 45-foot-tall satellite, which will have a 64-foot solar panel span in space, will be flown to Kennedy Space Center, Fla., this month and attached to a rocket.

The satellite will be carried by the shuttle into an orbit 155 miles high and then boosted into a highly elliptical orbit ranging from 6,200 miles to 86,800 miles above the Earth.

Originally dubbed the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, the satellite was renamed in December after a contest that drew more than 6,000 entries.

Fifty-nine people submitted the name Chandra. Based on essays, two were named co-winners: Tyrel Johnson, a student at Priest River Lamanna High School in Laclede, Idaho, and van der Veen, who teaches at Camarillo High School and is affiliated with the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

PHOTO A computer image shows the Chandra X-ray Observatory as it will look in orbit more than 6,000 miles up.

Associated Press