Unlike the past year, when Chandra was dressed up and ready to go while her ride into orbit was continually delayed, controllers and team scientists now have plenty to keep their minds off the wait.
With Chandra in a rough orbit, and its solar panels deployed, controllers now face a busy schedule of orbit adjustment and telescope calibration. During the next six days, controllers will turn on and align the telescope's lower antenna and its transmitter, then begin a series of five firings of Chandra's engines to place the observatory into a precise orbit. Then there will be a few weeks of testing and calibrating the instruments.
All this will take 20 to 30 days, said Martin Weisskopf, a Chandra project scientist at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Weisskopf, who has been working on Chandra since 1977, told space.com that when all the work is done, scientists will train the scope's X-ray eye on Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant in our own galaxy. If anybody on Earth had been watching Cassiopeia A about 300 years ago, they would have seen a star annihilate itself in a giant explosion. What remains of that star is a hot bubble of expanding plasma, dust and gas and shockwaves expanding across space.
Cassiopeia A was chosen as Chandra's first target, not only because scientists are dying to know more about the supernova, but also because the area will provide spectacular images.
"If there's one thing we know, it's that the public likes spectacular pictures from space," Weisskopf said. "If we go out and point it at some boring black hole, it just looks like a point and there's nothing to see."
Chandra will provide images of Cassiopeia that have 50 times better resolution than those made by the best X-ray telescopes on Earth.
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