Powerful Telescope Set for Launch

By MARCIA DUNN - AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP), The world's heftiest, mightiest, priciest X-ray telescope is about to embark on a five-year voyage to stare deep into the hearts of galaxies and search for signs of black holes.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, a 4-story colossus stuffed into space shuttle Columbia and due to lift off Tuesday, is 10 to 100 times more powerful than any of the dozen or so X-ray telescopes previously placed in orbit.

If words glimmered in X-rays, Chandra could read a newspaper from a half-mile away or make out the letters of a stop sign from 12 miles away.

``We can make Superman jealous, I guess, with our X-ray vision,'' NASA manager Ken Ledbetter says with a smile.  The astronauts, led by NASA's first female space shuttle commander, Eileen Collins, will release Chandra with the flick of a switch seven hours after launch. It will be another month before the telescope's eagerly awaited observations begin.  X-rays are produced by quasars, galaxies, remnants of exploded stars and other celestial objects, but are invisible to ground-based telescopes.

They would go right through flat mirrors, like those used to focus light on the Hubble Space Telescope, or the lenses used in many smaller telescopes, so Chandra uses conical mirrors. The X-rays will glance off the sloping glass at a shallow angle like pebbles skipping across a pond.

``This is an age that we live in where superlatives are used in everything from sports to politics, probably a little bit too much,'' says Martin Weisskopf, a NASA scientist who has been working on the project for two decades. ``But I can't help but use those superlatives with this observatory. They are really well based.''

The telescope, built by TRW Inc., cost $1.5 billion to develop.  Throw in the shuttle ride and five years of orbital operations, and the price jumps to $2.8 billion, making it one of NASA's most expensive science projects ever.

Chandra, named for the late astrophysicist who won a Nobel Prize, is the third of NASA's four so-called Great Observatories.  The first was Hubble and the second was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991.

With Chandra's help, astronomers hope to learn how much so-called dark matter is out there and where it is, and more about the matter swirling into black holes and the high-energy jets of matter shooting away from them. They also hope to better calculate the distance to celestial objects, useful in estimating the size and age of the universe.

Chandra should have flown last summer, but was sidelined by bad circuit boards and other problems.

Also causing heartburn for NASA in recent months has been the rocket motor that's attached to Chandra, because it is similar to one that malfunctioned on an Air Force satellite in April and left that spacecraft in a worthless orbit.

The solid-rocket motor is needed to propel Chandra from the relatively low altitude of the shuttle into a lopsided orbit with a low point of 6,200 miles and a high point of 87,000 miles, one-third of the way to the moon.

Chandra, the rocket motor and support gear together weigh 50,000 pounds, making it the heaviest shuttle payload ever.  NASA officials say they're confident the thoroughly checked motor, and the telescope itself, will work.

Hubble was launched in 1990 with a flawed mirror that blurred its vision. It took millions of dollars and a daring space shuttle mission to correct Hubble's eyesight, now the envy of the world.  Rigorous testing of Chandra's fully assembled optics uncovered no flaws, says NASA's top space scientist, Ed Weiler.  Still not satisfied, Weiler just a few months ago asked a favor of the director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center in Cambridge, Mass.

``Come up with the grossest, most outlandish problems that you can think of and then make a list and go look at them and make sure that they're not there,'' Weiler asked.

Because of the initial embarrassment over Hubble, the Chandra team is reluctant to brag too much or applaud too soon. Says NASA's Ledbetter: ``We'll get really excited when we see it up there working.''

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