| | | | | | |
| | |||||
|
The Story of SCO X1: Launch!It takes a few minutes to get to the 100 mile altitude that is necessary to be sure that the X-rays get into your detectors instead of being absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. Plenty of time to agonizingly anticipate the observation and reflect upon the two previous attempts which failed, once when the rocket engine misfired, and again when the rocket door to the detector failed to open. In the two years that followed the first failure, Riccardo Giacconi's team at American Science and Engineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts had developed a detector a hundred times more sensitive than any ever flown before. It is this new improved payload that is now being launched. The time has come. For several hundred seconds on the 18th day of June, 1962, the rocket will sweep the sky, looking at our Moon. What?! X-rays from the MOON???? Yes, the Moon shines by reflected light of the Sun, so a certain fraction of the Sun's X-rays will be reflected off the lunar surface, back toward the Earth, and the rocket. It was logical to look at the Moon as the next step in exploring the X-ray universe. Not glamorous, not spectacular, certainly, but LOGICAL.  The Moon in visible light |
||||||||
Revised: August 29, 2006
|
||||||||
