A Brief History of High-Energy (X-ray & Gamma-Ray) AstronomyWe list here (in reverse chronological order, notice) many important events in the history of astronomy, particularly high-energy astronomy (X-ray astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy and cosmic-ray astronomy), with particular emphasis on events concerning space-based observatories with X-ray and gamma-ray detectors on board which observed cosmic (i.e., non-solar) sources. (Some of the major events in planetary exploration missions are listed, but for a comprehensive chronology, see the NSSDC Chronology of Lunar and Planetary Exploration).Also available:
A graphical version of the dates
of operation of high-energy astrophysics missions,
For more detailed information on NASA's possible future
astrophysics and physics missions, see
the NASA Astrophysics website.
For more on the history of NASA, see the
NASA History Office website.
Index by Year Range
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| 2012 Jan 3 | End of scientific operations of NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) spacecraft after 16 years of highly successful operations. In celebration of its many contributions to astronomy, there was a special RXTE session at the January 2012 AAS Meeting in Austin, Texas, and there will be a symposium and banquet at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on March 29 and 30, 2012. |
| 2011 Oct 23, ~01:50 UTC | Re-entry and destruction in the Earth's atmosphere of ROSAT (Roentgen Satellite), a German Aerospace Center (DLR for Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt) satellite with X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet detectors, likely somewhere in a region with a large uncertainty ranging over the Indian Ocean, the Andaman Sea, Myanmar, Laos and China according to Jonathan McDowell. ROSAT was the workhorse high-energy astrophysics mission of the 1990s, conducting an all-sky survey in the soft X-ray band (0.1 - 2.5 keV) in 1990 and then many pointed observations through late 1998. Despite its fiery demise, ROSAT's legacy archive of data is available at the HEASARC. |
| 2011 Mar 18 | Insertion into orbit around Mercury of NASA's MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft. In order to become the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, MESSENGER followed a tortuous path through the inner solar system, including one flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus, and three flybys of Mercury itself. MESSENGER's science goals during the year-long orbital phase of its mission are to provide the first images of the entire planet and to collect detailed information on the composition and structure of Mercury's crust, its geologic history, the nature of its thin atmosphere and active magnetosphere, and the makeup of its core and polar materials. |
| 2011 Feb 17, 12:00 noon PST | Turn-off of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft transmitter signalling the end of scientific operations, after completion of both its primary cryogenic mission, an infrared sky survey, and of its post-cryogenic "NEOWISE" mission. The latter was designed to complete WISE's survey of the solar system, including near-earth objects (NEOs), and its 2nd all-sky survey, albeit only in its 2 shorter-wavelength IR bands. |
| 2011 Jan 27 | The discovery of the (as of this date) likely most distant/oldest object yet known, the proto-galaxy UDFj-39546284, is announced in an article by Bouwens et al. (2011 Nature, 469, 504). This galaxy was photometrically identified as a likely high-redshift (z ~ 10.3) object in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field: this redshift corresponds to an age within only 480 Myrs of the Big Bang. |
| 2010 Dec 25, 1:38pm EST | The Swift Burst Alert Telescope detects the start of a gamma-ray burst (GRB 101225A), the emission from which lasted 28 minutes, unusually long for GRBs. This very long duration has led to two very different competing explanations for what produced it: either a novel type of sypernova located billions of light years away, or an unusual collision of a large comet-like object with a neutron star within our own Galaxy. |
| 2010 Nov 30 | First science flight of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint project of NASA and DLR (the German Aerospace Center), demonstrating the aircraft's potential to make discoveries about the infra-red universe. The Boeing 747SP-based telescope made a 10-hour flight at altitudes up to 45,000 feet where the sky is much more transparent to IR radiation than at lower altitudes, and made scientific observations using the highly sensitive Faint Object Infra-Red Camera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) at wavelengths of 5.4, 24 and 37 microns. This flight "mark[ed] SOFIA's transition from flying testbed to flying observatory" according to Bob Meyer, NASA's SOFIA program manager. |
| 2010 Oct 21 | The discovery of the (as of this date) most distant galaxy yet, UDFy-38135539, is announced in an aticle by Lehnert et al. (2010 Nature, 467, 924). This galaxy was photometrically identified as a likely high-redshift object in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and the authors' 14.8 hrs long spectroscopic follow-up with the ESO Very Large Telescope detected an emission line at 1.1616 microns which, if redshifted Lyman-α, implies a redshift of 8.555, corresponding to an age of within 600 Myrs of the Big Bang. This record-breaker was superceded on 2011 January 27 (q.v.) by the announcement of the discovery of the (proto-)galaxy UDFj-39546284 with a redshift of ~10 |
| 2010 Aug 19 | The end of operations of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a mission designed to determine the geometry, content, and evolution of the universe via a 13 arcminute FWHM resolution full-sky map of the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It succeeded brilliantly in these goals: in the words of the astronomer John Bahcall, WMAP turned "cosmology from speculation to precision science" (see, for example, this table of cosmological parameters). |
| 2010 Jun 21, 03:03:32 UT | The Swift satellite detected a 200-second long gamma-ray burst (GRB 100621A), and rapidly slewed to point its narrow-field optical/UV and X-ray detectors at it. No optical afterglow was seen, although a near-IR afterglow was detected in ground-based observations by Greiner et al (2010, GCN Circular 10874), but intense X-ray emission was detected, with a peak level 14 times brighter than the X-ray flux of Sco X-1. This X-ray flux (~3 x 10-6 erg s-1 cm-2) is the brightest ever detected for a GRB. |
| 2010 May 26 | First-light flight of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint project of NASA and DLR (the German Aerospace Center), ushering in a new era of infra-red observational capabilities. The Boeing 747SP-based telescope made a 6-hour flight at altitudes up to 35,000 feet where the sky is much more transparent to IR radiation than at lower altitudes, and made scientific observations of Jupiter and M82 using the highly sensitive Faint Object Infra-Red Camera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) at wavelengths of 5.4, 24 and 37 microns. The image stability and pointing precision of these observations met or exceeded the pre-flight expectations. |
| 2010 Feb 11 | Launch of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun's influence on the Earth and the
near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere at exquisitely fine scales
in both space and time and at many wavelengths including the visible,
ultraviolet, extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray regions. SDO contains a suite of instruments that will provide observations leading to a more complete understanding of the solar dynamics that drive variability in the Earth's environment. This set of instruments will: 1. Measure the extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance of the Sun at a rapid cadence 2. Measure the Doppler shifts due to oscillation velocities over the entire visible disk 3. Make high-resolution measurements of the longitudinal and vector magnetic field over the entire visible disk 4. Make images of the chromosphere and inner corona at several temperatures at a rapid cadence 5. Make those measurements over a significant portion of a solar cycle to capture the solar variations that may exist in different time periods of a solar cycle |
| 2010 Jan 26 | The Death of Geoffrey Burbidge, a leading astrophysicist of the twentieth century, and co-author of one of the most influential astronomy papers of all time, yclept B2FH, which presented a detailed theory and observational support for stellar nucleosynthesis. This theory stated that all but the lightest elements in the Universe are created by nuclear reactions inside stars and supernovae, i.e., 'we are stardust, ...billion-years-old carbon'. |
| 2009 Dec 14 |
Launch of NASA's Wide-field
Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft on a Delta II rocket from
Vandenberg Air Force Base. WISE will provide an all-sky survey from 3 to 25
microns with 500,000 times the sensitivity of the Cosmic Background
Explorer (COBE) Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) and
hundreds of times that of the
Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The survey will help search
for the origins of planets, stars, and galaxies and create an infrared atlas
whose legacy will endure for decades. WISE will: * Find the most luminous galaxies in the Universe * Find the closest stars to the Sun * Detect most Main Belt asteroids larger than 3 km * Enable a wide variety of studies ranging from the evolution of planetary debris discs to the history of star formation in normal galaxies * Provide an important source catalog for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). |
| 2009 | 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescopic observations. This will be celebrated as the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009), "a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture", to be coordinated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). |
| 2009 Jul 15 | Launch of space shuttle Endeavour on the STS-127 mission, which carried (inter alia) the JAXA Monitor of All-Sky X-ray Image (MAXI) experiment for installation on the International Space Station (ISS). MAXI is an all-sky X-ray scanner, consists of X-ray slit cameras with high sensitivity, which will continuously monitor X-ray-emitting astronomical objects over a broad energy band (0.5 to 30 keV), i.e., it is an X-ray all-sky monitor. |
| 2009 May 12 | Launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-125 mission to repair and expand the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This was the fifth and final servicing mission to HST and should enable it to continue operations through 2013, and potentially even longer, funding permitting. |
| 2009 Apr 29 | The Swift satellite detects a 6-second long gamma-ray burst (GRB 090429B), which optical and infrared follow-up observations performed using the Gemini North Telescope, the Very Large Telescope and the GRB Optical and Near-Infrared detector suggest is the most distant GRB ever detected, with a photometric redshift of 9.4 which translates to a distance of 13.14 billion light years from Earth. This discovery, announced by Cucchiara et al. (2011, ApJ, accepted) on 2011 May 25, makes this one of the most distant individual objects of any type that has ever been observed, even more distant than the redshift 8.555 galaxy UDFy-38135539 announced on 2009 Oct 21, but not quite as distant as the proto-galaxy UDFj-39546284 (z ~ 10.3) announced on 2011 Jan 27. |
| 2009 Apr 23 | The Swift satellite detects a 10-second long gamma-ray burst (GRB 090423), which infrared follow-up observations performed using the UKIRT and the Gemini North Telescope confirm is the most distant GRB ever detected to this date, with a redshift of 8.2 which translates to a distance of 13.035 billion light years from Earth. This was also the most distant individual object of any type that had ever been observed, until the announcement on 2009 Oct 21 of the redshift 8.555 galaxy UDFy-38135539 and the announcement on 2011 May 25 of the redshift 9.4 GRB 090429B. |
| 2008 Oct 1 | 50th anniversary of the start of operations of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in 5 facilities inherited from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) agency which it subsumed, together with space projects and appropriations from other space programs. These gave NASA 8,240 staff (8,000 from the NACA) and a budget of approximately $340 million. |
| 2008 Jul 29 | 50th anniversary of the signing into law of the act establishing NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the civilian space agency of the United States of America, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. |
| 2008 Jun 11, 12:05 pm EDT | Successful launch on a Delta II Heavy rocket of the
Fermi Gamma-Ray Space
Telescope, formerly known as
Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), a NASA/DOE mission
with international partners. Fermi is the next generation high-energy
gamma-ray observatory designed for making
observations of celestial gamma-ray sources in the energy band
extending from 10 MeV to more than 100 GeV. It follows in the footsteps
of the CGRO-EGRET experiment, which was operational between 1991-1999.
The key scientific objectives of the Fermi mission are: 1. To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, pulsars, and SNRs. 2. To resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission. 3. To determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients. 4. To probe dark matter and the early Universe. |
| 2008 May 25 | Successful soft-landing on the northern plains of Mars of NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission. Once it was fully activated, Phoenix dug into the soil, discovering subsurface water-ice, and performed chemical analyses which were designed to help scientists understand the past and present habitability of this unique environment for (hypothetical) Martian microbes. |
| 2008 Apr 25, 05:12-08:00 UT | The Swift satellite detects an unusually intense X-ray `superflare' from the single nearby M dwarf star EV Lacertae. Analysis confirms that this is the brightest stellar flare ever detected in the X-ray band, e.g., the peak X-ray flux is 3 x 10-8 erg s-1 cm-2 in the 0.3-10.0 keV band. This flare was bright enough in the hard X-ray range that it was also detected in the 20-70 keV energy band by the Konus S2 gamma-ray burst detector on NASA's Wind satellite. At its peak, this flare was brighter than the star's entire bolometric luminosity (see Osten et al. 2008, ATel, No. 1499 for more details). |
| 2008 Mar 19 | NASA's Swift satellite observes the brightest gamma-ray burst optical afterglow yet detected. The afterglow of GRB 080319B was bright enough to have been seen with the naked eye, reaching a maximum brightness between 5th and 6th magnitude. Spectra indicate that this object has a cosmological redshift of 0.937, meaning that it is 7.5 billion light years away (in light travel time distance), and that the explosion actually happened 7.5 billion years ago, i.e, 3 billion years before the Sun and solar system formed: see Bloom et al. (2009, ApJ, 691, 723) and Wozniak et al. (2009, ApJ, 691, 495) for more details on this "most luminous optical object ever recorded by humankind". |
| 2008 Mar 19 | Death of Arthur C.
Clarke (1917 - 2008), noted science fiction writer and futurologist,
who inspired many people all over the world with his prescient and elegant
visions of humanity's and the universe's past, present and future, and the
roles and limitations of technology: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL", and not forgetting: "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out". |
| 2007 Aug 30 | NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, crosses the solar wind termination shock (multiple times) and enters the heliosheath region, the transition region between the region dominated by the solar wind (the "heliosphere") and the true interstellar medium. |
| 2007 Aug 4 | Successful launch on a Delta II rocket of NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission, a spacecraft that will soft land on the northern plains of Mars on May 25th 2008. Once safely landed, Phoenix will literally dig into the soil and subsurface water-ice and perform chemical analyses designed to help scientists better understand the past and present habitability of this unique environment for hypothetical Martian microbes. |
| 2007 Apr 26 | First low-altitude (up to 10,500 feet) test flight of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint project of NASA and DLR (the German Aerospace Center). Normal operations for this Boeing 747SP-based telescope will be conducted at altitudes above 40,000 feet where the sky is much more transparent to IR radiation than at lower altitudes. The first flight on which general astronomical observations will be made is currently expected to be in 2010. |
| 2007 Apr 23 | Successful launch on an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) PSLV rocket of the Agile (Astro-rivelatore Gamma a Immagini LEggero, or Light Astro Gamma Imaging Detector) payload. AGILE is an Italian Space Agency gamma-ray mission conceived as a bridge between the EGRET gamma-ray detector on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO) and the GLAST mission. The AGILE telescope (30 MeV - 50 GeV) will measure the electron and positron resulting from the gamma-ray pair conversion process, together with a calorimeter that will determine the energy. An anti-coincidence detector will separate the gamma rays from the background of cosmic ray charged particles found in space. Smaller than EGRET, improved technology gives AGILE comparable on-axis sensitivity, a much wider field of view (about 3 sr, or one-fourth of the sky), better angular resolution (5 - 20 arcminutes for strong sources) and a much smaller deadtime (less than 1 millisecond). This combination of features will allow AGILE to expand on the EGRET discoveries significantly and set the scientific groundwork for the much larger NASA GLAST mission. AGILE should be ideal for detecting AGN flaring activity, gamma-ray bursts, pulsars, new transients, solar flares, and cosmic-ray interactions in the Galaxy. |
| 2007 Feb 28, 05:44 UT | Closest approach to Jupiter of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. New Horizons received a velocity boost due to Jupiter's gravity to help speed it on its way to Pluto, which it is scheduled to encounter in July 2015. |
| 2006 Aug 13, 21:13 UT | NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, becomes the most distant human artifact in space, reaching a distance of 100 Astronomical units (15 billion km) from the Sun, on its way to and beyond the edge of the solar system or heliopause. |
| 2006 Jan 19, 19:00 UT | The successful launch of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on its 9.5 year flight to Pluto and its moon Charon via Jupiter (from which it will get a velocity boost using the gravity assist from a close approach). New Horizons is the first spacecraft dedicated to the exploration of the Pluto-Charon system, and it may go on to explore even more distant Kuiper Belt Objects after its Pluto fly-by in 2015. |
| 2005 Dec 16 | The Swift satellite detects an unusually intense X-ray `superflare' from the binary system II Pegasi. Analysis confirms that this is one of the brightest stellar flares ever detected in the X-ray band, e.g., 100,000 times more X-ray luminous than the most intense solar flare yet seen, and the detection of X-rays up to an energy of 200 keV strongly favors a non-thermal model for the hard X-rays (see Osten et al. 2007, ApJ, 654, 1052). |
| 2005 Sep 29 | The end of the data collection phase for the Gravity Probe-B (GP-B) spacecraft, when the helium in its dewar was finally exhausted. This experiment had four incredibly precise, supercooled gyroscopes which tested two predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, namely the existence and the magnitude of the gravitomagnetic (`frame-dragging' of space-time by the rotating earth in this case) and the geodetic (the space-time curvature caused by the gravitational field of the earth) effects that are predicted by this theory. This mission is now in the data analysis phase, currently expected to continue until September 2008, although preliminary reports are that GP-B has already confirmed the presence of the geodetic effect (170 times larger than the frame-dragging effect) to a precision of better than 1%. |
| 2005 Sep 4 | The Swift satellite detects an unusually long (200 seconds) gamma-ray burst (GRB 050904), which optical follow-up observations confirm is one of the most distant GRBs ever detected, with a redshift of 6.29 which translates to a distance of 12.7 billion light years. Only two other objects, a quasar with a redshift of 6.4 and a GRB in 2008 (GRB 080913) with a redshift of 6.7, had been discovered at greater redshift/distance than this GRB by this date (but the new record holder is the 2009 April 23 GRB, q.v.). |
| 2005 Jul 9 | Successful launch of the Suzaku (formerly called ASTRO-E2) X-Ray Observatory, a replacement of the ASTRO-E mission which suffered a launch failure on February 10 2000. Suzaku is Japan's fifth X-ray astronomy mission, and was developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in collaboration with U.S. (NASA/GSFC, MIT) and other Japanese institutions. Suzaku covers the high-energy range from 0.4 - 700 keV with three instruments, an X-ray micro-calorimeter (X-ray Spectrometer; XRS, unfortunately inoperational after 1 month), four X-ray CCDs (X-ray Imaging Spectrometer; XIS), and the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD). Suzaku uses the Universe as a laboratory for unraveling complex, high-energy processes and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions. Scientific issues that will be addressed during its mission include the fate of matter as it spirals into black holes, the nature of supermassive black holes found at the center of quasars, the 100 million degree gas that is flowing into giant clusters of galaxies, and the nature of supernova explosions that create the heavier elements, which ultimately form planets. |
| 2005 Jul 4, 1:52 am EDT | Impact of NASA's Deep Impact impactor spacecraft with Comet Tempel 1 at a relative velocity of 10 km/s (23,000 mph), generating an intense flash of light, and starting a prolonged outburst of comet material. This event and its aftermath were observed by the nearby Deep Impact mothership, as well as a host of other ground- and space-based telescopes and observatories, including the Chandra, RXTE, and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories, and the Swift multi-wavelength suite of detectors. Analysis of all these datasets should yield unique and valuable information about the space environment, interior composition and structure of this comet. Early results indicate that Tempel 1 was detected as an X-ray source by XMM-Newton and Chandra. The observed X-rays are likely the result of charge exchange between cool neutral material in the comet's coma and highly charged solar wind ions. |
| 2005 | This year was designated the World Year of Physics: Einstein in the 21st Century by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics as a celebration of the centenary of Albert Einstein's `miraculous year' of 1905 in which he published 3 of his most influential papers. |
| 2005 May 9, 5:03:23 UT | First accurate localization of a short gamma-ray burst, GRB 050509b, by instruments on NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission. This GRB lasted only 40 milliseconds, and was followed by a 5-minutes X-ray afterglow that was studied by Swift's X-Ray telescope. No associated optical afterglow was detected, either by Swift's Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope or by ground-based telescopes, but the location of this GRB on the outskirts of a 2.6 billion light years-distant elliptical galaxy suggests that it (and presumably other short GRBs) is the birth `scream' of a black hole as it forms from the merger of two neutron stars (or of two pre-existing black holes, or of a neutron star with a pre-existing black hole) in a close binary system. See Gehrels et al. (2005, astro-ph/0505630) for more details. |
Index by Year Range
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to this page: Jesse S. Allen, and Ian M. George along with JPL's Space Calendar and the Working Group for the History of Astronomy's Astronomiae Historia (History of Astronomy) information pages.
All dates/times are east-coast time for the U.S.A., unless otherwise stated. NET means 'no earlier than'. Please send information concerning dates/deadlines not currently included on this page and/or corrections to:
Web page author: Stephen A. Drake (based on an original by Jesse S. Allen)
Web page maintainer: Stephen A. Drake
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