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Space X-ray telescope arrives for tests at RAL
December 10, 1996An X-ray telescope weighing half a tonne, due for launch on a Russian spacecraft in 1998, arrived at CLRC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory today for thermal tests. With conditions in space so different from those on Earth (space is an icy-cold vacuum), it is vital to test any instrument before launch to make sure that it can work in a vacuum at temperatures of about -270?C. This will be simulated by suspending the telescope inside RAL's new Space Test Chamber - a 5 meter-long steel tank, lined with panels cooled by liquid nitrogen.
The Joint European Telescope for X-ray astronomy (JET-X) is over 4 meters long and weighs 540 kg; it is one of the biggest space astronomy instruments ever to be built in the UK. It will also be the most sensitive X-ray telescope ever launched, allowing it to see fainter and more distant X-ray objects than before. Astronomers will be able to use this telescope to see some of the most violent processes in the universe - for example the death of stars as they explode into supernovae and evidence of black holes at the centres of many galaxies. JET-X has been built by a consortium of groups from Italy and Russia and led by the UK. It will be delivered to Moscow next summer for integration onto the Spectrum-X spacecraft, a Russian X-ray observatory, and will be launched in the following year on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
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