Nearly a quarter-century after its launch, a famed NASA X-ray telescope may get its first service call in space.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory launched to Earth orbit in July 1999 to review high-energy events within the universe. Despite a number of glitches lately, the telescope stays in good health — and a proposed private servicing mission could keep it that way.
For the past 18 months, Northrop Grumman has been quietly exploring a mission concept to Chandra, whose orbit reaches to greater than one-third the gap of the moon. And this is not the one ambitious possible space telescope servicing mission within the works; private firms are also investigating the potential for sending spacecraft out to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.
Each mission presents its own challenges. Hubble is near Earth, however the space shuttle originally designed to service it has retired. Spitzer is incredibly removed from our planet, at two astronomical units (sun-Earth distances), but there isn’t any energetic risk to observations provided that the scope was shut off in 2020. Chandra, by comparison, is each removed from Earth (in a highly elliptical orbit) and likewise still in service, creating an interesting servicing puzzle.
The possible Chandra servicing mission was first brought forward publicly on the American Astronomical Society’s annual Goddard Space Symposium in March 2022, via remarks from Jared Rieckewald. He was then senior director of business development at Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary, SpaceLogistics. (Rieckewald died unexpectedly in February 2023 (opens in recent tab) at age 44.)
The proposal would send an area tug (often called a mission extension vehicle) to Chandra that may be “purpose-built” for the telescope, Rieckewald said; on the time, he suggested SpaceLogistics could send the unsolicited proposal to NASA as soon as the top of 2022. Northrop Grumman has not commented publicly on the matter since being quoted in an IEEE Spectrum report (opens in recent tab) in October 2022, nevertheless.
“It could extend Chandra by a long time,” Rieckewald noted in recorded remarks (opens in recent tab) in regards to the proposal. The mission wouldn’t only allow Chandra to proceed scrutinizing the universe in X-ray wavelengths, that are unimaginable to see on Earth’s surface because of our atmosphere, but in addition to work with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Chandra has already reexamined Webb images to realize recent insights in X-ray wavelengths.
Essentially the most recent U.S. decadal survey in astrophysics, released in 2021, included mention of a brand new X-ray telescope — but at a lesser priority than an area observatory optimized to review infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. (The decadal survey is a community consensus of scientific priorities.)
“We predict we’ve got options that help NASA sustain (Chandra) at a fraction of the value of a brand new observatory,” Rieckewald said of the survey. Hubble’s service history, he added, the team suggests that top issues to take into consideration while servicing Chandra can be refueling and maintaining scientific precision of its instruments.
Ensuring Chandra’s instruments are tuned properly is an especially crucial matter in X-ray observations, provided that the observatory records extremely short wavelengths of 0.01 to 10 nanometers. (A nanometer is the same as one-billionth of a meter.) That leaves less of a margin of error to work with than visual light, which has for much longer wavelengths of roughly 380 to 700 nanometers, in response to NASA (opens in recent tab).