The Other Shuttle

Scheduling shuttle flights from Boston to Washington, D.C., is easy for many of Harvard's faculty busy in the Clinton administration.

But planning for week-long Space Shuttle flights, designed in part by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientists, can be slightly more difficult and time-consuming.

Take, for example, one research project which has commanded the attention of 25 scientists for 15 years: the creation of a high quality telescope to focus X-rays.

According to Harvey D. Tananbaum, director of the AXAF Science Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, the advanced X-ray astrophysics facility (AXAF) allows physicists to produce images of objects which cannot be differentiated by other telescopes.

But despite all the work already devoted to the project, finishing stages are still in the distant future: The first telescopes should arrive in space, most likely via a shuttle, in 1998 or 1999.

Scientists are optimistic that the telescope will provide insight into supernovae and the chemical composition of stars. "AXAF will be very powerful," says Tananbaum. "I think it looks very good."

According to James Cornell, a center spokesperson, the Smithsonian Center will be the site of an AFAX Science Center, a $30 million NASA-funded station where images will be analyzed and archived.

But planning 15 or 20 years ahead in astrophysics is difficult, says Cornell, because research projects cannot proceed without Congressional approval and NASA funding.

NASA indirectly sponsors and funds a number of Harvard-affiliated scientists, from the Smithsonian Center and the Division of Applied Sciences, who create and design space experiments for the Shuttle. The Center for Astrophysics, boasting a professional staff of 200 researchers, is funded and supported by NASA to study seven categories of space science.

Direct contracts are issued to the Smithsonian, but many scientists and doctors who work at the center hold joint appointments with Harvard. Researchers prepare experiments and equipment for the spacecraft but do not participate in the launching preparation.

Center projects to be completed within the next five to ten years include tether systems which are analogous to satellites on strings, a device called Spartan which produces artificial eclipses, an infrared telescope and several specialized satellites.

According to Giovanni G. Fazio, senior physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, researchers are developing the space infrared telescope facility (SIRTF) in hopes of better understanding star formation by looking at the cores of dense stellar clouds.

Fazio, also a lecturer in the Astronomy Department, says he expects the telescope to be launched by the year 2002. He hopes the telescope will enable scientists to detect of planets clustered around stars as well as the study of early galaxy formation, or "cosmic birth."

But just ask Gary J. Melnick, a Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist and a lecturer on astronomy, how current NASA projects compare with those of decades past.

Melnick is working on a satellite which will measure aspects of star formation and interstellar chemistry, expected to be launched in two years. He says the project's schedule sharply contrasts current NASA plans such as the Hubbell space telescope, which even after appearing late failed to work properly.

"NASA projects have had a habit of taking one or two decades to come to fruition," Melnick says. "This experiment is intended to show that NASA can get back to what it was doing in the 1960s."