Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of the Chandra X-ray Observatory launch, which sent the most powerful X-ray telescope created into space. However, this anniversary is a bittersweet one.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s FY2025 budget was released, and it included a call for cuts to Chandra’s operating budget. In fact, the new budget even appears to signal a close-out period for the telescope starting during the next fiscal year, according to the American Astronomical Society.
“The FY25 budget request is not a decision to decommission Chandra,” explained Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in an interview with the AAS. “We are instead looking to the mini-Senior Review process to help APD establish a more affordable operations paradigm for both Hubble and Chandra.”
He also said that a review of the 2024 fiscal year budget compared to the most recent one showed a $44 million to $100 million drop on funding for the Astrophysics Division over a period of years. This will result in “difficult decisions,” Clampin explained.
Save Chandra, a group aiming to keep the telescope operational, said that the first cuts to Chandra’s budget would result in nearly half of its staff being laid off this October. It said the cuts are due to H.R. 3746 (the Debt Ceiling agreement of 2023) and its caps on non-defense discretionary spending
“This is not NASA’s fault. Nobody at NASA wants this, and Chandra has been a crown jewel of the NASA Astrophysics portfolio for 25 years,” said Save Chandra.
According to NASA, the telescope is “specially designed to detect X-ray emission from very hot regions of the Universe such as exploded stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes,” as it orbits up to an altitude of 86,500 miles in space. Down on Earth, the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., hosts the Chandra X-ray Center which operates the satellite, processes the data, and distributes it to scientists around the world for analysis. Around 18% of the staff there are military veterans, Save Chandra said.
Since it launched in 1999, data from Chandra has led to over 700 PhDs, supported a diverse talent pool of more than 3,500 undergraduate and graduate students and more. Scientists have authored more than 10,000 peer-reviewed papers based on data from the telescope and there is consistent demand for its use – only about 20% of the requested observing time is approved.
“Chandra has been a great success story for humanity and its pursuit of knowledge,” said Andrew Schnell, acting project manager of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Chandra’s incredible accomplishments are made possible by the team’s hard work and dedication.”
David Pooley of Trinity University, an astronomer who has been using Chandra since it launched, noted that Chandra’s team recently teamed up with the James Webb telescope to discover a supermassive black hole at the edge of the universe. He said there’s no other telescope like it, according to NPR.
“Its ability to detect distant objects is unmatched by any other X-ray telescope that’s ever been built or will be built and operating – for at least another decade, likely two decades,” Pooley says. “Turning off this great observatory for a relatively small cost savings would severely damage the U.S.’s leadership in this entire field.”
Save Chandra claims that some of the financial justification for cutting funding to Chandra is incorrect. It argues that “Chandra is healthy, efficient, and has possibly more than a decade of life left,” and that “premature cancellation of the mission would likely trigger a death spiral in X-ray astronomy, both nationally and even perhaps globally.”
NPR reported that Chandra experts such as Paul Levitt are also taking to social media to plead for the instrument’s future.
“Hope they can stave off the stupid decision to kill the mission,” he said in a Monday X post. Seth Moulton, a Democratic U. S. representative from Massachusetts, is also advocating for its future.
“I’m listening to the over 700 astronomers who have signed a letter saying, ‘This work is important. It needs to continue,’” Moulton told NPR. “I really think it’s up to those of us in Congress to try to find the money to ensure that it does.”
NASA told the outlet in a statement that: “NASA will share its decisions, taking input from the review’s findings, in a virtual town hall in the coming weeks.”