The Chandra Observatory, NASA's newest orbiting telescope, will be launched sometime after April 8, 1999, aboard the space shuttle Columbia. The 45-feet long, 5-ton space station will house the most powerful X-ray observatory ever built. Scientists will use it to examine X-rays emanating from incredibly dense, collapsed objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and matter falling into black holes, areas in which Chandrasekhar did pioneering work to kickstart the esoteric cosmic terrain called astrophysics.

Work in this area won him a Nobel Prize in 1983. Specifically, Chandrasekhar postulated that a star whose nuclear fuel is exhausted will remain a star in the form of a slowly cooling white dwarf about the size of Earth, only if the star's mass is less than 1.4times the mass of the sun, a benchmark now known as the Chandrasekhar limit. If the mass of the star is greater than 1.4 solar masses, then the burned out star collapses on itself and vanishes.

NASA chose to select Chandra's name for the space station after hosting a naming contest which attracted more than 6000 entries from 50 countries. Of those, 59 entries picked Chandra for the honour. The last X-ray telescope was name after Einstein. An independent panel selected two winners, who both wrote essays suggesting Chandra's name: Jatila van der Veen, a physics and astronomy teacher from California, and Tyrel Johnson, an Idaho High School student.

``It freaked me out that he did such great work when he was so young, when he was still in India. I couldn't think of a better candidate,'' said Johnson, 15, who read about Chandra's feats when he working on a school project.

Incredibly, Chandra, as he was known among his peers and students, wrote the paper postulating the theory of gravitational collapse in1930, when he was only 19 and earning a bachelors degree from Madras University. The Lahore-born Tamilian continued to build on this for more than half a century, mostly at the University of Chicago, after he migrated to the United States in 1948. ``Chandrasekhar made fundamental contributions to the theory of black holes and other phenomena that the Chandra X-ray Observatory will study. His life and work exemplify the excellence that we can hope to achieve with this great observatory,'' said NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

``Chandra was one of the greatest astrophysicists and this is a great honour for him and India. This could not have happened to a more modest man,'' said Dr Vinay Kashyap of the Harvard Smithsonian Institute of Astrophysics, a Chandra student who is part of team which built the telescope. Scientists now say that based on Chandra's work, contemporary astrophysicists use the laws of physics to help understand how the universe began and might end, how stars are born, evolve and die, andthe nature of cosmic phenomena like black holes, white dwarfs and neutron stars. Chandra will provide images that are fifty times more detailed than previous x-ray missions.

Only last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science rated as the top scientific event of 1998 the discovery that a strange force is helping push the universe apart and helping it expand faster. Two of Chandra's colleagues in the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Don Lamb and Robert Rosner, will be among the scientists who will conduct research with the Chandra Observatory.

In fact, all three of NASA's Great Observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, are named after University of Chicago scientists. The University has the highest number of Nobel Laureates in the world in its faculty.

Lamb will use the Chandra Observatory to study the production of X-rays by compact stars, which is related both to Chandrasekhar's earliest work and to someof his later work in general relativity and the mathematical properties of black holes. ``The Chandra Observatory has wonderful capabilities for advancing our understanding of these incredibly energetic and violent phenomena,'' he said. Rosner will use the Chandra Observatory to study X-ray emissions from stars to better understand the sun's X-ray emissions. The research may help answer questions about the sun's interaction with the Earth's atmosphere during their youth and the possible biological effects of high levels of ionizing radiation during this epoch.