The Chandra X-ray Observatory began its mission again in 1999 when Area Shuttle Columbia launched it from its payload bay. Initially, it was alleged to serve solely a five-year mission, but it surely has managed twenty-four years up to now and counting, offering invaluable science together with the opposite Nice Observatory: the Hubble Area Telescope. Sadly, NASA’s FY2025 price range now appears to be like to threaten all house telescopes and Chandra particularly. This comes as a part of the bigger FY2025 US price range, which sees whole funding for NASA improve by 2%, however not sufficient to stop cuts in NASA’s house telescope operations.
NASA already anticipated this reduce in 2023, with funding shifting to the Nancy Grace Roman Area Telescope (infrared spectrum, scheduled for 2027). Since Hubble is a joint operation with ESA, any shortfalls is perhaps caught this fashion, however Chandra’s price range will go from 68.3M USD in FY2023 to 41.4M USD in FY2025 and from there plummeting to five.2M USD by FY2029, successfully winding down the challenge and ending NASA’s flagship X-ray astronomy mission. This doesn’t sit properly with everybody, with a web site known as Save Chandra now launched to petition the US authorities to avoid wasting the observatory, noting that it nonetheless has a decade of gas for its thrusters remaining and it additionally has steady mission prices.
Very similar to Hubble, Chandra is working properly previous its unique design life and has needed to be patched again collectively on a couple of events. Regardless of this, each are important instruments for astronomy and associated fields, with the lack of both an enormous blow. Regardless that Chandra wouldn’t be actively decommissioned, its science mission would come to an finish, with solely a imprecise hope remaining of an eventual revival in a future price range.
Sadly, the scientific neighborhood doesn’t have an enormous voice within the US Congress. Nonetheless, those that are within the US can comply with the directions on the Save Chandra web site to contact their Congressional Consultant or Senator. Different choices embrace signing the neighborhood letter to NASA and Congress and, in fact, making your dissatisfaction identified on social media. With sufficient of a push from the neighborhood, maybe Chandra can proceed to do science till 2030.
Area telescopes typically want glasses. Conserving them funded is commonly a battle.