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Drawing portraying mission orbit of Chandra
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed
by Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, will be the most sophisticated
X-ray observatory ever built.
The Chandra is designed to observe X-rays from high energy regions of the
universe, such as hot gas in the remnants of exploded stars. The two
images of the Tycho supernova remnant shown below illustrate how higher
resolution improves the quality of an image:
The image on the left is from a low-resolution detector on
the Einstein Observatory. The image on the right, taken by
the High Resolution Imager on the Einstein Observatory,
has ten times better resolution, or finer detail (pixel area
ten times smaller), than the one on the left. The Chandra Xray Observatory's
images will be fifty times better than the image on the right.
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