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An organization of Perkin-Elmer retirees and other former employees

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Latest Club & Member News Briefs

 as of
 2-26-2010

 


Click here to go to the
PE-LEGACY-ROOM

 

 

 

Click on the events page to see party photos

 

 


Did you know the most precision optics made
 in the world were made by

 Perkin-Elmer
 
for the X-Ray Telescope at that time the
program was called
 
AXAF
 subsequently changed to the
 Chandra X-ray Observatory

   

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is part of NASA's fleet of "Great Observatories" along with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitizer Space Telescope and the now deorbited Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra allows scientists from around the world to obtain unprecedented X-ray images of exotic environments to help understand the structure and evolution of the universe. Already surpassing its five-year life, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is rewriting textbooks and helping advance technology. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is the world's most powerful X-ray telescope. It has eight-times greater resolution and is able to detect sources more than 20-times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope.

3C305

The Chandra telescope system consists of four pairs of mirrors and their support structure. 

X-ray telescopes must be very different from optical telescopes. Because of their high-energy, X-ray photons penetrate into a mirror in much the same way that bullets slam into a wall. Likewise, just as bullets ricochet when they hit a wall at a grazing angle, so too will X-rays ricochet off mirrors.

The mirrors have to be exquisitely shaped and aligned nearly parallel to incoming X-rays. Thus they look more like glass barrels than the familiar dish shape of optical telescopes. They are the smoothest and cleanest mirrors ever made.

 


LINKS:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/top_ten.html

AXAF High Resolution Mirror (HRMA)

 

 

Send your news to Don Mahon at donmahon2@msn.com to include in this column.