One of NASA’s Great Observatories may soon meet an untimely demise. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory—an orbiting telescope launched in 1999 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia—is facing a major financial threat in NASA’s latest budget proposal. Major cuts to its funding could lead to layoffs for half of the observatory’s staff by October and, according to concerned scientists, a premature end to the mission around 2026. Astronomers are worried that losing a telescope so crucial to our studies of the high-energy cosmos could set the field back by decades.
In an open letter, a group of astronomers claimed that Chandra “is capable of many more years of operation and scientific discovery” and that a “reduction of the budget of our flagship X-ray mission will have an outsized impact on both U.S. high-energy astrophysics research and the larger astronomy and astrophysics community.”
“It’s a huge monetary and environmental toll to put an observatory up in space, so I think it’s really important to value that and to not treat these instruments as disposable,” adds Samantha Wong, an astronomer at McGill University. “People outside of astronomy contribute to the cost of these instruments (both literally and in terms of environmental and satellite pollution), so it’s in everyone’s best interest that we use Chandra to the full extent it’s capable of.”
Chandra was launched in the 90s along with the optical and ultraviolet Hubble Space Telescope, the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope (recently decommissioned in 2020), and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (the shortest lived of the bunch, ending in 2000). Much like the powerhouse Hubble, Chandra was initially meant to operate for five years—but its enduring excellent performance has cemented it as a pillar of astronomy research for the past two and a half decades. Although any piece of equipment will naturally degrade over time, Chandra continues to return excellent…
Read the full article here