X-ray telescope vanishes.Years of hard work went up in smoke on Feb. 9 when the Japanese X-ray telescope Astro-E burned up just minutes after takeoff. Because of a problem with the first stage of its launch rocket, the craft never reached orbit and fell back toward Earth. Intended to join two other recently launched X-ray telescopes--NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory Chandra X-ray Observatory U.S. X-ray space telescope. It was named after astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and was launched into orbit in 1999. Its mirror, with an aperture of 1.2 m (4 ft) and a focal length of 10 m (33 ft), produces unprecedented resolution. and the European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM XMM - Extended Memory Manager ) satellite--Astro-E would have measured the energies of individual X rays with unequalled precision. The craft's X-ray spectrometer x-ray spectrometer n. A spectrometer using x-rays to separate the chemical constituents of a substance into their characteristic spectral lines for identification and determination of their concentration. , developed jointly by NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. and Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, was designed to analyze the high-energy X rays emitted by sources covering sizable patches of the sky. Such objects include galaxy clusters and supernova remnants. Detectors on Chandra and XMM can't easily observe emissions from objects that loom so large. "It is almost impossible to compensate for the absence of the X-ray spectrometer," says Richard Mushotzky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC employs approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors, and is located approximately 6.5 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Md. The European Space Agency's Integral mission will have a high-energy X-ray detector, but it won't fly for at least 18 months, he notes. |
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