WASHINGTON D.C. -- The Chandra X-ray Observatory mission has been extended by NASA from five years to 10, a move that was expected by mission planners but greeted with excitement nonetheless.
At a symposium here celebrating the two-year anniversary of the telescope, scientists associated with the mission said it was a vindication of Chandra's good work so far in probing the distant universe for exotic objects like neutron stars and black holes.
"It has lived up to all our hopes, giving us front-row seats to phenomena light years away -- exotic celestial objects, matter falling into black holes and stellar explosions," said Chandra project scientist Martin Weisskopf. "Adding five more years of operation to Chandras mission will provide double the opportunity for amazing discoveries."
The mission extension means Chandra should eventually see deeper into the cosmos, said Roger Brissenden, manager of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. And some phenomena will be understood better because they will be observed over time, allowing changes to be seen.
The Smithsonian center, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, operates the telescope for NASA.
The annual operational budget for Chandra is $55 million to $60 million. Though no firm budget is in place for the extension, previous mission extensions have typically been accompanied by budgets that were reduced by 20 to 25 percent, Brissenden said. In an interview, he said he expects a similar budget scenario for Chandra.
The telescope is in a stable orbit that reaches a third of the way to the Moon. Computer simulations show that it will not fall to the Earth or suffer any other orbital problems for at least 30 years. Other telescopes placed in orbits closer to Earth, such as the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, have had shorter life spans.
Brissenden said Chandra has so far had no significant technical glitches, a sign that the telescope may well be durable enough to continue operating for many years. That's a relief to mission planners as the telescope, unlike the Hubble space telescope, is not designed with handholds and other features so astronauts could repair it.
While the design requirement for Chandra was officially five years, engineers built it with a goal of much longer, he said.
"People typically talked of 10-plus," Brissenden said. "And the science community who were driving the mission were talking 15-plus."
But only after Chandra proved its worth did NASA's official decision come down. Yet the idea had been in the works even at the highest levels of planning.
"At some point after launch, when it was clear that the mission was going fine, the budget planning process started to look at a 10-year mission," he said.
The mission extension might allow researchers to make more detailed studies of distant objects that are so far only barely detectable in X-rays. With the added years, scientists could go back and make long exposures of known X-ray sources that are so far away that only a few photons (or units of light) reach the telescope each week. No one yet knows what such objects are.
And with longer exposures, even more distant objects might be found.
Other known objects, like jets of X-ray energy that shoot out from dense stars or exploding shells of supernovae, might be imaged repeatedly over the years to create time-sequence animations.
So when will scientists and mission planners start lobbying for an extension to 15 years?
"We already are," Brissenden said.
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