X-ray monitoring mission comes to an end
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - 05:30
in Astronomy & Space
On Dec. 30, 1995, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) was launched into orbit on a mission to observe and study X-ray sources in space. For 16 years, the satellite circled Earth, detecting X-rays emitted by some of our galaxy’s most extreme phenomena: bursting pulsars, flaring neutron stars and massive, spinning black holes. The instruments aboard RXTE — including one engineered by MIT researchers — captured data that helped scientists make major discoveries in X-ray astronomy for more than a decade.