November 15, 2024
4 min learn
Ending NASA’s Chandra Will Minimize Us Out of the Excessive-Decision X-Ray Universe
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is dealing with closure. Shutting it down could be a loss to science as an entire
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as it might seem at about 50,000 miles from the Earth, almost twice as excessive as Earth-orbiting geosynchronous satellites.
Walter Myers/Stocktrek Photographs Inc. Alamy Inventory Photograph
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is the darling of high-energy astrophysics. Famed for offering unequaled x-ray views of voracious supermassive black holes, exploding large stars and even darkish matter-infused collisions between galaxy clusters, the spacecraft probes the greatest mysteries in astrophysics.
However 25 years after seeing its first mild, Chandra’s future is up within the air.
In March NASA slashed Chandra’s finances from $68 million in 2024 to $41 million in 2025 and $26 million a 12 months later. In line with the Chandra X-ray Heart, which operates the telescope, this solely permits for mission closeout. Within the months since, a collection of occasions—together with an intense publicity marketing campaign and a present of congressional assist—has saved Chandra funded by way of September 2025. However for this 12 months’s Senior Evaluate, which evaluates NASA’s missions, the Chandra X-ray Heart has been advised to remain inside the proposed finances numbers—that’s, to plan how the spacecraft will shut down.
It is a mistake. Chandra ought to stay operational till it encounters a vital failure or is changed by a comparable mission. Chandra is the solely excessive angular decision x-ray telescope in house, and there’s no mission with comparable capabilities scheduled to interchange it till 2032 on the earliest.
One might ask: What new discoveries can Chandra make that it hasn’t remodeled the previous 25 years? And that’s a superb query. However our observational capabilities have modified tremendously since Chandra was launched, and due to this fact so has its potential for making discoveries that require a number of telescopes. We’ve solely just lately reached the period of multiwavelength, multimessenger astrophysics, permitting simultaneous views of stars and galaxies in every part from the radio spectrum to gamma rays, neutrinos and gravitational waves. A lot of that vital synergy shall be misplaced and squandered if we surrender on the high-resolution x-ray protection.
In a way, Chandra was forward of its time. A number of the discoveries it will likely be remembered for, such because the detection of sound waves from supermassive black holes, are Chandra-only science. However its most important latest outcomes come from the mixture of its eager x-ray imaginative and prescient with new devices such because the James Webb House Telescope or the Occasion Horizon Telescope.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory was the heaviest payload to be carried into house by a shuttle. It has been supernovas, black holes and spiral galaxies for 20 years.
In 2017, when the emitted gravitational waves of two merging neutron stars reached Earth, all the main observatories on this planet carried out follow-up observations on this historic, never-before-seen celestial occasion. The binary neutron star merger resulted in a kilonova explosion, which shone throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. Its x-ray emission was as a result of explosion’s blast wave accelerating particles and gave us details about the fabric surrounding the binary. No different facility might have localized the merger as precisely as Chandra did: our understanding of probably the most necessary astrophysical occasions of contemporary occasions could be incomplete with out it.
After a quarter-century of operations, Chandra is a well-oiled machine, with a extremely skilled workforce that has tailored to the ageing telescope. Protecting Chandra up and operating on the forefront of astronomy “is getting more complex, but it’s not getting costlier. We’re just getting better at it every single day,” says Daniel Castro, an astrophysicist at Chandra Science Operations.
The crux of the matter lies within the presidential finances request from final March, which to communal consternation mischaracterized Chandra as quickly degrading and more and more costly. An extra supply of frustration inside the group is that NASA sidestepped its personal peer-review process for evaluating the timeliness of mission closeout, the Senior Evaluate (which had given Chandra high marks in 2022), by unexpectedly chopping Chandra’s funding. The finances cuts finish Chandra’s mission with none dialogue or enter from the astrophysics group.
An attention-grabbing selection of NASA’s was to award $50 million to the event of the Liveable Worlds Observatory, or HWO, the place the identical funding would maintain Chandra totally operational. HWO is an infrared, optical and ultraviolet NASA flagship telescope that’s 20 to 30 years from launch, and which can probably value greater than its estimated $6 to $10 billion.
Webb, whose prices ballooned from an preliminary $2 billion to $8 billion, looms giant within the determination to prioritize funding for HWO. It’s commendable that NASA is maintaining a tally of future challenges, however a whole lot of this primary allocation of cash for HWO will go into preliminary overheads, equivalent to constructing a venture workplace and establishing trade partnerships. It’s value contemplating whether or not awarding $50 million, a long time earlier than launch, to a multibillion-dollar mission justifies shutting down a mission as productive as Chandra.
Astronomers have thrown round concepts for different sources of funding for Chandra, equivalent to promoting its operations to the Japanese or European House companies or counting on personal donations. Collaboration with different house companies and corporations is commonplace in astrophysics, however it’s a prolonged course of, and a whole lot of the know-how in Chandra is walled off by U.S. know-how switch restrictions. And NASA’s coverage directive, whereas it permits for donations, doesn’t enable for situations on their use. Apart from, do we would like (generally erratic) house billionaires to increase into elementary science? Entry to the universe is a public good, and most of us astronomers want to keep away from the chance that oligarchs develop into its gatekeepers.
Killing Chandra highlights the stress inherent in flagship-style astronomical missions. They make gorgeous discoveries, however in addition they have a method of absorbing the finances of medium-size or present missions. We want extra highly effective telescopes as a result of they open new parameter house, which is the way in which actually revolutionary discoveries get made. However there’s a delicate stability to be maintained right here: What are we giving up by allocating such early funding to HWO? I’d say we’re opening a window, however closing a door. We’re selecting to be blind to the high-resolution x-ray universe. And that’s a loss to science as an entire.
That is an opinion and evaluation article, and the views expressed by the writer or authors usually are not essentially these of Scientific American.
