Einstein Fellowship

About Chandra

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy. Chandra was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999 Part of NASA's fleet of Great Observatories, Chandra is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date.

The Chandra telescope is designed to probe extreme physics by observing X-rays from objects such as supernovae, accreting black holes, and galaxy clusters. The Chandra spacecraft carries a high resolution mirror, two imaging detectors, and two sets of transmission gratings for spectroscopy.

Latest Chandra Press Release

September 25, 2008

Press Release Image

One of the nearest supernovas in the last 25 years has been identified over a decade after it exploded. This result was made possible by combining data from the vast online archives from many of the world's premier telescopes.

The supernova was first singled out in 2001 by Franz Bauer, then at Penn State and now at Columbia University, who noticed a bright, variable object in the spiral galaxy Circinus using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Though the source displayed some exceptional properties, at the time Bauer and his Penn State colleagues could not confidently identify its nature. Complete Release