"We've had a major hiccup," said Harvey Tananbaum, director of the Chandra Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), just as NASA's new X-ray telescope was to make its first science image on Aug. 17, 1999.
The next 30 hours were tense as engineers worked to pull the orbiting craft out of a "safe mode," which it had automatically entered after receiving two incompatible commands from ground control.
The problem fixed, history would soon be made. Chandra X-ray Observatory officials released the first image on Aug. 26, 1999. It was said to be the best X-ray image ever made of a cosmic object.
Four years later, the orbiting telescope has produced an array of discoveries and important contributions to the understanding of the high-energy universe, including the staggering output of most distant and ancient galaxies, as well as the more modest riot of castoff energy surrounding nearby black holes and other exotic stars.
X-rays do not penetrate Earth's atmosphere, so it has only been since 1962 that astronomers have had a glimpse of this form of radiation coming from beyond our solar system.
While not the only space-based X-ray observatory, Chandra is the finest machine of its class.
Late last month, NASA awarded a five-year mission and contract extension to the SAO for the telescope's operation and science outreach having to do with Chandra.
The following images were selected by the SAO based on multiple criteria, including which generated the most traffic at their web site and which got the most attention in the media. The text is mostly theirs, though it's been edited slightly by SPACE.com. Click the images to enlarge them.
1. Crab Nebula
Over the past 12 months, news about black holes pulled in most of the headlines as far as Chandra went, with four of the top five stories.
But it was the venerable Crab Nebula, with the spectacular Chandra/Hubble movie production of its amazing pulsar and dazzling tornado of high-energy particles and magnetic fields, that was the most popular.
The still images in this collage were made over a span of several months (ordered left to right, except for the close-up). They provide a stunning view of the activity in the inner region around the Crab Nebula pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star seen as a bright white dot near the center of the images.
A wisp can be seen moving outward at half the speed of light from the upper right of the inner ring around the pulsar. [Full Story]
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