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."