A NASA X-ray telescope recently celebrated a quarter century in space.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. On July 23rd, 1999, on July 23rd, 1999, the Chandra X-ray telescope was launched into space

aboard the shuttle Columbia, the first such mission to be commanded by a woman

astronaut. The goal for engine start, zero, we have booster

ignition and liftoff of Columbia, reaching new heights for women X-ray astronomy. The Chandra telescope differs from the Hubble

telescope which observes visible light or the James Webb

telescope which captures frequencies in the infrared range.

Chandra detects high energy x-rays,

but NASA budget constraints could leave the mission going dark in coming years.

To learn more about the Chandra Observatory, we called its program manager, Megan Lynn.

Chandra is unique in that it's a telescope that collects x-ray data.

So when NASA launched the Great Observatory's program, it wanted to launch a satellite that could collect information in each part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So we're used to looking up in seeing the amazing space that we can see with our eyes,

but we're only getting a small part of that story. There's so much happening that we can't see in the universe.

So Chandra was designed to specifically look at x-rays and x-rays that are emitted by objects in deep space.

So that gives us information about some of the hottest and most energetic events that happen.

So for example, things like supernova,

when a star explodes, that releases a lot of x-ray.

And we can learn a lot about that through studying it

and looking at it with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

How has it contributed to you know science and our understanding of the universe?

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