🛰️ Mission
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
- Launched
- 23 July 1999, 27 years ago
- Working for
- 27 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- X-rays
- Where it is
- A long looping orbit that carries it a third of the way to the Moon
- Best known for
- Pictures of gas at millions of degrees: exploded stars, colliding galaxies, and matter falling into black holes
Did you know?
- X-rays go straight through an ordinary mirror, so its mirrors are barrel-shaped and the X-rays graze off them like a stone skipping on water.
- It is named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who worked out how massive a dead star can be before it collapses.
What it showed us
Sagittarius A*
The giant black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.
More NASA photos of Chandra X-ray ObservatoryStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.