Revealing the Universe: The Making of the Chandra X-ray Observatory

  • Wallace Tucker &
  • Karen Tucker
Harvard University Press: 2001. 296 pp. $27.95

Revealing the Universe tells the exciting story of the birth of X-ray astronomy and the development of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched by the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999. The observatory, previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, is one of NASA's four Great Observatories for space astrophysics, together with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory and the Space InfraRed Telescope Facility. Its unique imaging capability, high sensitivity and spectral resolution in the soft and hard X-ray wavebands enable us to investigate the nature of high-energy phenomena from such extraordinary objects as supernovae, neutron stars and black holes.

X-ray photons have such high energies that they interact strongly with the Earth's atmosphere, making it impossible to use ground-based instruments for observing astronomical X-ray sources. In 1962, Riccardo Giacconi, Herbert Gursky and colleagues, using a simple X-ray detector carried on a rocket, discovered the first cosmic X-ray source, Sco X-1 (in the constellation Scorpius), and the cosmic X-ray background, opening up X-ray astronomy as a new window on the Universe.

The success of the Uhuru X-ray satellite in the early 1970s led to calls for a large X-ray telescope that could provide data of almost the same quality as an optical telescope. Wallace and Karen Tucker describe the technological and political challenges from the first proposal for a large X-ray telescope in 1970, to the launch of the Chandra X-ray Observatory some 30 years later. They offer an inside view on the efforts by many people, including Harvey Tananbaum, Giacconi, Martin Weisskopf and Charlie Pellerin, to implement this enormous NASA project.

The book focuses more on the story of Chandra than on astrophysics, but it does present an overview of the first impressive results from the observatory's mission. One minor shortcoming is the lack of a mention of Europe's recent contributions to X-ray astronomy, in particular those made by the XMM-Newton observatory.