Genuine teamwork was a key ingredient of the success of the Chandra x-ray observatory mission. Examples are the science center personnel working as part of the instrument principal investigators (IPI) teams during pre-launch development, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) supporting NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) by directly working with the prime contractor, TRW (now Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems), and TRW acceptance of outside scientists performing the data reduction and analysis for qualification of the aspect camera. An end-to-end thread was defined early on, based on the MSFC/SAO operation of the Einstein observatory x-ray telescope, and covered the cycle from solicitation and peer review of observation proposals through scheduling to data processing and delivery. An open science working group chaired by MSFC included instrument principal investigators and interdisciplinary scientists spanning diverse astrophysical and instrumental expertise.

Date Published: 24 July 2014
PDF: 14 pages
Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91440S (24 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2054677

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9144:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray
Tadayuki Takahashi; Jan-Willem A. den Herder; Mark Bautz, Editor(s)