Mary-Louise Hoffman
Northrop Grumman has worked with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Smithsonian Institution to transfer the operations control center of the orbiting Chandra space telescope to a facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, from its previous location near Harvard University's campus in Cambridge.
The company said Wednesday NASA recognized the Chandra OCC relocation team with an agency-level Honor Award for collaborative efforts to carry out the project between early 2017 and July of last year while ensuring the X-ray space telescope continues to function and deliver scientific data.
A Northrop-led industry team built the telescope to help researchers observe X-ray emission from the universe's very hot regions and understand the role of matter around black holes in galaxy cluster formation.
NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia deployed the observatory to orbit in July 1999 and the Smithsonian's Astrophysical Observatory hosted the instrument's former operations hub in Cambridge.
