Tag: Chandra

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Cosmic Space

Astronomers detect first hints of extragalactic planet

Suspected planet in M51
The white square highlights the suspected planet in M51. (NASA / CXC / SAO / DiStefano et al.; Optical: NASA / ESA / STScI / Grendler)

A blip recorded by the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has pointed astronomers to what might be the first planet detected passing across a star in a galaxy beyond our own — but we may not know for sure anytime soon.

The observation of an X-ray transit in the spiral galaxy M51, about 28 million light-years away in the northern constellation Canes Venatici, is reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Even if the detection of a planet in M51 goes unconfirmed, the Chandra observations demonstrate that X-ray transits could become a new method for tracking planets far beyond our solar system.

“We are trying to open up a whole new arena for finding other worlds by searching for planet candidates at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to discover them in other galaxies,” Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the newly published study, said in a news release.

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GeekWire

Hubble Space Telescope is on the road to recovery

Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope hangs in orbit after a 2002 servicing mission. (NASA Photo)

Things are looking up for two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Both telescopes had to go out of service this month due to different types of problems experienced by their gyroscopic pointing systems.

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Chandra X-ray telescope is back at work

Chandra X-Ray Observatory
An artist’s conception shows the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. (NASA / CXC / SAO Illustration)

NASA’s 19-year-old Chandra X-ray Observatory has been returned to its normal pointing mode after a data glitch forced a five-day outage, NASA said today.

The bus-sized spacecraft went into safe mode on Oct. 10, bringing science observations to a halt. The Chandra mission’s operation team determined that the outage was caused by a fault in one of the gyroscopes used by Chandra’s pointing system. That fault resulted in a three-second period of bad data, which led the onboard computer to calculate an incorrect value for the spacecraft’s momentum, NASA said in today’s status update.

The erroneous reading triggered the safe-mode condition, which caused Chandra to swap critical hardware operations to backup units and reconfigure its mirrors and solar panels to avoid the risk of damage.

Chandra’s operation team diagnosed the problem and switched gyroscopes to get the pointing system up and running again. The gyroscope that experienced the glitch has been placed in reserve.

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Gyro glitch hits Chandra X-ray telescope

Chandra X-Ray Observatory
An artist’s conception shows the Chandra X-ray Observatory. (NASA / CXC / SAO Illustration)

Even as experts worked on ways to get the Hubble Space Telescope back doing science, another one of NASA’s Great Observatories in space — the Chandra X-ray Observatory — went into safe mode as well.

NASA said the 19-year-old X-ray telescope put itself into hibernation on Oct. 10, possibly due to an issue with its gyroscopic pointing system. A gyro failure was behind the 28-year-old Hubble’s transition to safe mode last week.

Due to the glitch, Chandra swapped critical hardware operations to backup units and pointed its solar panels to soak up the maximum amount of sunlight, while pointing its mirrors away from the sun to minimize the risk of damage.

“All systems functioned as expected and the scientific instruments are safe,” NASA said in a status update issued Oct. 12.

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