Word: rays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Henry, an associate of the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) who worked on a vital component ("it's analogous to an X-ray T.V. camera") of HEAO-2's sensitive X-ray telescope, decided he didn't want to watch the launch on a monitor...
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...
...backtrack a bit, though, twenty years ago, X-ray astronomy barely existed. Today it is at least as important as optical and radio astronomy in helping earthbound scientists study the skies...
...rays, energetic particles which are emitted from a variety of celestial objects and travel at the speed of light (approximately 186,000 miles/sec.), cannot be detected on Earth because the atmosphere absorbs them before reaching the surface--thus the need to get into space to conduct X-ray observations...
Back in 1960, when the only known source of X-rays in space was the sun (though astronomers suspected they would find other sources if they had the equipment to look for them), Riccardo Giacconi, then with American Sciences & Engineering and now a professor of Astronomy here, first proposed a method for using telescopes to take detailed X-ray photographs of distant objects...