Chandra's First Decade of Discovery

History of Chandra

The High Resolution Mirror Assembly Design

Craig Golisano, ITT
Keith Havey (ITT), Nicolle Lynch (ITT), Rob Reese (ITT), William Smith

The heart of the Chandra X-ray observatory is the High Resolution Mirror Assembly (HRMA). This major subassembly consists of the 8 Wolter Type-I x-ray mirrors in a metrology stable mount system. This system was referenced to the instruments using a Aspect Determination System that used a precision periscope assembly to transfer the sky location to the instruments. In addition, this whole assembly is thermally controlled with less than 100 watts of power with the use of precision thermal pre- and post collimators. This poster will detail the major components of the HRMA and how they all work to create a better than 1 arcsec optical assembly.

[PDF of this poster]

Verification Engineering Test Article (VETA) - I: The Challenge of the Congressional Mandate for a Comprehensive Test of the P1/H1 Mirror Elements

Gary Matthews, ITT
Keith Havey (ITT), John LesVeaux (ITT Retired), Jeff Wynn (ITT Retired), Greg Young (NGAS), Tom Casey (ATK)

This poster will show the overall design of the VETA-I and how it was used to meet the Congressional mandate to demonstrate 0.5 arcsec full width half max performance. The largest two mirror elements (P1/H1) were mounted in a metrology mount and actively aligned using x-rays. The entire assembly was surrounded by a thermal enclosure to control the environment of the two mirrors.

[PDF of this poster]

Verification Engineering Test Article (VETA) - II: The Path to a Successful Flight Build

Gary Matthews, ITT
Charlie Atkinson (NGAS)

This poster will show the VETA-II in the ITT assembly tower and how the demonstration was used to understand the nuances of how to build the flight High Resolution Mirror Assembly (HRMA). Like the VETA-I, the largest two mirrors were aligned in a replica of the HRMA and an end-to-end mirror integration and alignment process was demonstrated. This VETA-II provided key insight into critical ground support and process issues that would have severely impacted the flight hardware performance. This demonstration allowed those shortcomings to be identified and corrected prior to the start of flight integration and test.

[PDF of this poster]

High Resolution Mirror Assembly: The Assembly Challenges

Gary Matthews, ITT
Charlie Atkinson (NGAS)

During the integration of the High Resolution Mirror Assembly (HRMA), a continuous learning process was adopted. Each step in the process provided critical insight into how the future assembly would operate. Process development was on-going as more was learned during the assembly effort at ITT. This poster will provide a overview of the lessons learned and the process development that took place to enable the HRMA to meet all performance criteria on-orbit.

[PDF of this poster]

X-ray Testing of the High Resolution Mirror Assembly: The Path to a Successful Flight Build

Gary Matthews, ITT
Kathy Rapp (ITT), Tom Scorse (ITT), Scott Texter (NGAS), Jon Arenberg (NGAS), Roger Carlson (SpaceX)

The x-ray calibration of the High Resolution Mirror Assembly provided a whole new set of challenges for the Chandra team. This poster will provide an overview of the test program and how the team worked through these issues in a time effective way in order to stay on schedule whole meeting the science needs for a highly calibrated optical assembly.

[PDF of this poster]

The Optical Bench: The Backbone of the Chandra Observatory

Cliff Olds, ITT
Rob Reese (ITT)

The Chandra Optical Bench is the large composite structure ever flown by NASA. This structure provides the critical metering system between the High Resolution Mirror Assembly (HRMA) and the Science Instruments (SI). The Optical Bench also had to with stand the Space Shuttle launch loads while maintaining the alignment between the HRMA and the SI's. This poster will show the integration and test of the Optical Bench at ITT.

[PDF of this poster]