Hub of the universe

"Kendall Square, we have a problem"

by Michelle Chihara

Greater Boston is chock full of multimillion-dollar government-sponsored labs. Even in this setting, One Hampshire Street is something unusual. The building at the corner of Broadway and Hampshire, in Cambridge, is home to mission control for the new Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the last of NASA's three "great observatories" and one of its most important space operations.

The $1.5 billion space telescope is controlled from a series of generic offices on the seventh floor: standard-issue blue-gray carpeting, no lobby art. At the center of it all is a glassed-in room, where a group of NASA employees sit wearing headphones and carefully monitoring screens filled with numbers, symbols, and blinking status bars.

The room is very quiet. It takes concentration, after all, to monitor and control a piece of equipment orbiting as high as 86,400 miles above the earth.

Chandra, launched from the space shuttle Columbia on July 23, was originally supposed to be controlled from Huntsville, Alabama, home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. But because the project's three scientific partners -- MIT, Harvard, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory -- are all located in Cambridge, operations were moved here two and a half years ago, partly to save money in an era of budget cuts to the space program. NASA has put both research and operations into the hands of the Cambridge team -- the most control over one of its projects that the organization has ever given to a non-NASA research group. "In the end it's less expensive to have the science center and the operations combined," says Stephen Murray, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This joining of forces meant that everyone had to make adjustments. Astronomer Roger Brissenden says the biggest challenge was forging scientists and engineers into a cohesive team. The training was like boot camp for physicists, including an Outward Bound-style ropes course in Framingham. "We jumped off 25-foot poles," Brissenden says.

For a year before the shuttle actually took off in July, the team spent long, grueling hours -- sometimes up to a week -- in launch simulations. The computers threw scores of simultaneous problems at the team, from solar batteries crapping out to overheated parts getting gunked up with space dust. Handling such situations badly would turn millions of dollars and years of work into space debris.

When Chandra disconnected from the shuttle, the process went almost flawlessly. It reached orbit on August 7, and its first images, called "First Light," were beamed down August 19. Unlike the Hubble telescope, which surveys visible light much like a regular telescope, Chandra sees x-rays, which are emitted by extremely violent space events such as exploding stars or black holes. The pictures that are up on the Web (http://chandra.harvard.edu) are actually color reconstructions of the data, not photographs. But they're still our first good images of objects such as Cassiopeia A, a supernova 10,000 miles away from earth with a dark spot that may prove to be our first "look" at a black hole.

Brissenden beams with boyish delight when discussing the project he's involved with. Tall, bespectacled, dressed in khakis, he talks about "good science" as if it were a rare juice to be squeezed out of the cosmos. "With First Light we saw something that no one had expected to see, and it began to dawn on me how powerful this was really going to be."

Soon, troops of Boston-area schoolchildren will be invited to make their way up to the seventh floor at One Hampshire Street. They may be disappointed not to find real-time images of quasars and pulsars throbbing on the screen. But if they're sharp, they will notice one thing familiar: while waiting for the next data dump from space, even NASA engineers sometimes play solitaire on their computers.