Chandra Xray Observatory The Chandra Xray Observatory Current

Chandra X-ray Observatory The Chandra X-ray Observatory: Current Status and Future Prospects Martin C. Weisskopf AAS 2011 May 23

Chandra involves and interests the community • 2979 distinct PIs and Co. Is in cycles 1 -11 • ~200 new PIs and Co-Is per year • Involved more than 1350 students and postdocs • Averaging over ~500 papers per year • Consistantly oversubscribed (>5) 2

Chandra continues to give us new insights Tennant et al. 2011 3

Working with other obervatories: Chandra & Fermi-LAT 4

The hunt for the site of the gamma-ray flare! 5

The hunt for the site of the gamma-ray flare!

Observatory status • Spacecraft is in excellent health – almost in the 13 th year – Designed for 3 years with a goal of 5 • All redundant systems are available except one pair of gyro rotors that has been swapped to a backup. – One of the switched gyro rotors is fully healthy and the second has reserve life. Chandra can operate with one rotor from each set • Thermal insulation has slowly degraded – Requires increased pitch restrictions and limits on constrained observations – Mission planning has managed impacts 7

Observatory status – continued Molecular contamination continues to build up on the ACIS filters 8

Observatory status There will (no doubt) be new challenges as Chandra ages However, overall observatory performance remains superb No known limitations to > 20 -yr mission 9

Example future projects Science Goal Observations Measure the expansion history of the universe for 0. 5<z<1 X-ray images & spectra for massive clusters Search for evidence of decaying dark matter particles X-ray images and spectra of galaxy clusters to test the evolution of fgas to z~1. 2 Measure WHIM features to constrain the High-resolution spectra of quiescent baryon overdensity blazars. Determine how AGN feedback operates in galaxies and clusters of galaxies Deep images galaxies and clusters and high-resolution spectra of bright AGN Measure the luminosity and evolution functions AGN Extend the CDFS survey inosities and higher z. Trace evolution of temperature, density, pressure and velocity of shocked material in young SNR Deep images and spectra of starburst galaxies to trace the metals and hot gas Measure mass and radius for bursting NS Grating spectra of X-ray binaries in outburst Extend mass and radius measurements for a number of neutron stars High-resolution spectroscopy to determine distances together with burst data from 10 other satellites

The opportunity for exploration and discovery with Chandra remains as high today as it was at launch 11