Dolores Beasley
Headquarters, Washington, DC               July 19, 2001
(Phone: 202/358-1753)

RELEASE: 01-147

NASA REJOINS JAPAN IN X-RAY SPACE OBSERVATORY PROJECT

     The United States and Japan will team up to rebuild and 
launch a powerful observatory for measuring high energy 
phenomena in the Universe. 

The Astro-E2 observatory will replace the original Astro-E 
satellite, which was lost during  launch in February 2000. The 
Japanese government recently approved the Astro-E2 mission and 
has invited NASA to participate. 

"The opportunity to support the rebuilding of the Astro-E 
observatory provides NASA with an excellent path for 
completing the ambitious goals of this program," said Dr. Alan 
Bunner, Science Director of NASA's Structure and Evolution of 
the Universe program.

Scheduled for launch in February 2005, the instruments on 
Astro-E2 will provide powerful tools to use the Universe as a 
laboratory for unraveling complex, high-energy processes and 
the behavior of matter under extreme conditions. These 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.

NASA will provide the core instrument, the high resolution X-
Ray Spectrometer (XRS). The XRS will be the first X-ray 
microcalorimeter array to be placed in orbit. It measures the 
heat created by individual X-ray photons. 

The XRS operates at a temperature of 65 mK, which is about 
-459.6 F, only 1/10 degree above absolute zero, and is held at 
this temperature by a three stage cooling system developed 
jointly by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 
and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan. 
The cryogenic system is capable of maintaining the temperature 
of the microcalorimeter array for about two years in orbit.

Japan will provide the other instruments on Astro-E2, a set of 
four X-ray cameras and a high-energy X-ray detector. NASA will 
also provide the five X-ray telescopes required to focus X-
rays on the XRS and the X-ray cameras.

"This increased precision for measuring X-rays should allow 
fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of essentially 
all types of X-ray emitting sources,&auot; said Dr. Richard Kelley, 
principal investigator for the U.S. participation of Astro-E2 
at Goddard. "This will be especially true of matter very close 
to black holes and the X-ray emitting gas in clusters of 
galaxies."

For more additional information on the World Wide Web about 
Astro-E, visit: 

              http://astroe.gsfc.nasa.gov

                             -end-

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