NASA/TRW Team Wins National Space Club Award for Chandra X-ray Observatory

A team of
scientists and engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
(MSFC), Huntsville, Ala., and TRW has been selected as the
winner of the National Space Club’s 2001 Nelson P. Jackson Aerospace
Award.

Named in honor of Nelson P. (“Pete”) Jackson, founder and past
president of the National Space Club, the award is presented annually
for outstanding contributions to the missile, aircraft and space
fields. The NASA/TRW team was honored for the on-orbit success of
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the world’s most capable X-ray
observatory. As NASA’s Chandra prime contractor, TRW led the industry
team that designed, built and deployed Chandra for MSFC in July 1999.
This year’s honor marks the fifth time TRW has won or shared in the
Jackson Aerospace Award.

Dr. Alan Bunner, the director of NASA’s Structure and Evolution of
the Universe theme, and Craig Staresinich, TRW’s Chandra program
manager, accepted the award on behalf of the team at the annual
Goddard Memorial Dinner, held on March 30 in Washington, D.C.

“The Chandra mission continues to be one of the most successful
and most productive X-ray space science missions NASA has ever
undertaken,” said Bunner. “This award is a tribute to the vision,
engineering talents and dedication to mission success of every member
of the government and industry team that collaborated on the project.”

“This award is a result of the TRW/NASA partnership that has
successfully developed and produced spacecraft for NASA’s most
challenging missions for more than 40 years,” said Staresinich. “In
collaboration with the science teams from NASA and the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory, we expect to remain a significant partner
in space astronomy discoveries for many years to come.”

The TRW-led contractor team that designed and built Chandra
included Eastman Kodak, which built the X-ray telescope; Hughes
Danbury Optical Systems, which produced the X-ray mirrors; and Ball
Aerospace and Technologies Corp., which built the integrated science
instrument module and Chandra’s aspect camera.

Chandra’s science instruments were provided by the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), Penn State University, MIT, Space
Research Organization of The Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute
in Germany. SAO conducts the Chandra science mission for NASA while
TRW leads the Chandra flight operations team at the Chandra Operations
Control Center, Cambridge, Mass.

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