Chandra

Chandra has an elliptical orbit which takes it more than 138,000 kilometers from Earth and then back to within 9600 kilometers of Earth. Chandra travels more than one-third of the way to the Moon with each orbit!

Chandra records observations of the universe in the high-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Chandra has the ability to record X-rays from clouds of gas with temperatures measuring in the millions of degrees.

Chandra means "moon" in Sanskrit.

Chandra proved that there was an upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf. This limit, known as the Chandra limit, showed that stars more massive than the Sun would explode or form black holes as they died.

In 1983 Chandra was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physical processes involved in the structure and evolution of stars.

In 1953, both Chandra and his wife Lalitha became American citizens.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected evidence of a possible planet transiting a star in another galaxy, and, for the first time, it detected X-rays from Uranus.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, which is able see through the shroud of dust and gas near black holes, astronomers have developed two theories.