NASA’s Great Observatories named for Chicago trio

NASA’s three Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, are all named for University of Chicago scientists. NASA’s infrared telescope, still under construction, is the only Great Observatory that remains unnamed. Together, these orbiting observatories will collect data from across most of the electromagnetic spectrum with multiple instruments over a period of years.

The Hubble Telescope, launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990, is named for Edwin Powell Hubble, who earned his bachelor’s degree at the University in 1910 and his doctorate in 1917. Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies besides our own existed in the universe, and that the universe is expanding. These findings form the cornerstone of the big bang theory of the universe’s origin and opened the field of cosmology.

The Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, launched aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 1991, is named for Arthur Holly Compton, who served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1923 to 1945. Compton earned the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics for his scattering experiment, which demonstrated that light has characteristics of both a wave and a particle.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, scheduled for launch aboard the space shuttle Columbia, is named for pioneering University of Chicago astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Chandra received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars. Chandra served on the Chicago faculty from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84. His major discoveries across the field of astrophysics spanned more than 60 years.