A Quick Look at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
Description:
On July 23, 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted into space carrying the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Twenty years later, a collection of new images has been released to commemorate this milestone. Chandra observes the cosmos with the sharpest vision of any X-ray telescope. These images represent Chandra's abilities to observe everything from nearby exploded stars to distant galaxy clusters. Chandra was originally proposed to NASA in 1976. It took decades of collaboration to make this revolutionary X-ray telescope a reality. Many of the phenomena Chandra now investigates were not even known when the telescope was being developed and built. Chandra is one of NASA's "Great Observatories" along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
