<title>Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO): overview</title>

Abstract

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO), the x-ray component of NASA's Great Observatories, was launched early in the morning of 1999, July 23 by the Space Shuttle Columbia. The Shuttle launch was only the first step in placing the observatory in orbit. After release from the cargo bay, the Inertial Upper Stage performed two firings, and separated from the observatory as planned. Finally, after five firings of Chandra's own Integral Propulsion System -the last of which took place 15 days after launch -the observatory was placed in its highly elliptical orbit of ∼140,000 km apogee and ∼10,000 km perigee. After activation, the first x-rays focussed by the telescope were observed on 1999, August 12. Beginning with these initial observations one could see that the telescope had survived the launch environment and was operating as expected. The month following the opening of the sunshade door was spent adjusting the focus for each set of instrument configurations, determining the optical axis, calibrating the star camera, establishing the relative response functions, determining energy scales, and taking a series of "publicity" images. Each observation proved to be far more revealing than was expected. Finally, and despite an initial surprise and setback due to the discovery that the Chandra x-ray telescope was far more efficient for concentrating low-energy protons than had been anticipated, the observatory is performing well and is returning superb scientific data. Together with other space observatories, most notably the recently activated XMM-Newton, it is clear that we are entering a new era of discovery in high-energy astrophysics.

Disc reflection and a possible disc wind during a soft X-ray state in the neutron star low-mass X-ray binary 1RXS J180408.9–342058

“…In this work we report on X-ray spectral observations of RXS J1804 obtained with NuSTAR (Harrison et al 2013), Swift (Gehrels et al 2004), and Chandra (Weisskopf et al 2000). These data were taken during the soft X-ray spectral state near the peak brightness of the 2015 outburst (see Table 1 and Figure 1).…”

NuSTAR UNVEILS A HEAVILY OBSCURED LOW-LUMINOSITY ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS IN THE LUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXY NGC 6286

“…A Chandra (Weisskopf et al 2000) ACIS-S (Garmire et al 2003) observation of NGC 6286 was carried out on UT 2009 September 18 (PI: Swartz) with an exposure of 14.2 ks. The data reduction was performed following the standard procedure using CIAO v.4.6.…”

The Chandra Deep Field North Survey. IX. Extended X-Ray Sources

“…This effort was conceived to advance the study of galaxy evolution to high redshifts, but it has since initiated one of the most intensive, multiwavelength investigations on the sky, influencing a wide range of astronomical topics (e.g., Ferguson et al 2000 and references therein) and yielding one of the most comprehensive data sets publicly available (e.g., deep imaging at nearly all astronomically accessible wavelengths and more than 700 spectroscopic redshifts within a $4 0 radius of the HDF-N). 6 Recently, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (hereafter Chandra; Weisskopf et al 2000) completed an %1 Ms survey of the HDF-N and its environs, providing an extremely sensitive view of the X-ray universe.…”