X-ray Telescopes - History of X-ray Telescopes

History of X-ray Telescopes

The first X-ray telescope employing Wolter Type I grazing-incidence optics was employed in a rocket-borne experiment in 1965 to obtain X-ray images of the sun (R. Giacconi et al., ApJ 142, 1274 (1965)). The Einstein Observatory (1978–1981) was the first orbiting X-ray observatory with a Wolter Type I telescope (R. Giacconi et al., ApJ 230,540 (1979)). It obtained high-resolution X-ray images in the energy range from 0.1 to 4 keV of stars of all types, super-nova remnants, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is among the recent satellite observatories launched by NASA, and by the Space Agencies of Europe, Japan, and Russia. Chandra has operated for more than 10 years in a high elliptical orbit, returning thousands 0.5 arc-second images and high-resolution spectra of all kinds of astronomical objects in the energy range from 0.5 to 8.0 keV. Many of the spectacular images from Chandra can be seen on the NASA/Goddard website.