Word: heao
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Henry added, "I kept expecting to see it blow up, but it didn't." Far from it. Not only did HEAO-2 attain a nearly letter-perfect orbit, but in its first five months the X-ray observatory has returned a wealth of previously unobtainable photos and data, found a probable answer to one of the universe's most difficult questions and raised numerous new ones...
...theory was there; but technology still needed time to catch up. "We realized that the technology would take many years to develop, but it was a great boost knowing that we ultimately knew a way to make X-ray astronomy very sensitive," Giacconi remembers. Before HEAO-2 could become a reality, though, X-ray astronomy would have to make sporadic progress. In 1962, a group headed by Giacconi discovered the first X-ray star; eight years later the same personnel were responsible for the first orbiting X-ray observatory (named "UHURU" after the Bantu word for freedom...
Though important advances resulted from these and other early missions, the results were still comparatively primitive--the best pre-HEAO-2 X-ray photos of the sky show only blurs and blotches. Though many different and powerful X-ray sources had been found-- among them the leftovers from stellar explosions ("supernova remnants"); some unusual galaxies; and quasars, star-like objects that gave off enormous amounts of energy--their precise structure still could not be observed...
...HEAO-2, dubbed the "Einstein Observatory" in honor of the physicist who was born a century ago this year, would change all that. With an X-ray telescope a thousand times more sensitive than any previous instruments, Einstein for the first time has been able to take high resolution X-ray photographs and accurately measure the size, shape and structure of X-ray sources as far as the edge of the known Universe--more than 15 billion light-years away...
...November 13 launch approached, a good part of the Center for Astrophysics revved up for the mass influx of raw data that soon would be arriving. All observation plans for and information analysis from HEAO-2's 0.6-meter reflection X-ray telescope are coordinated from CRA. It took a week for the first picture to arrive on the monitors in Room 306-B. That shot was of Cygnus X-1, a radiation source which many astronomers believe is a black hole, a compressed star with gravity so strong that light cannot escape from...