Chandra explores the hot turbulent regions in space with images 25 times sharper than previous x-ray pictures. Chandra is performing detailed studies of black holes, supernovas, and dark matter, to increase our understanding of the origin, evolution, and destiny of ...

Fermi, NASA's most recent gamma-ray observatory has a wide window on the universe. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, and the gamma-ray sky is spectacularly different from the one we perceive with our own eyes. With a huge ...

The Herschel Space Observatory is a space-based telescope that will study the Universe by the light of the far-infrared and submillimeter portions of the spectrum. It is expected to reveal new information about the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, ...

Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an ultraviolet, visible and infrared orbiting telescope, has expanded our understanding of star birth, star death, and galaxy evolution, and has helped move black holes from theory to fact. It has recorded over 100,000 images in ...

International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) seeks to unravel the secrets of the highest-energy - and therefore the most violent - phenomena in the Universe.

The Keck Interferometer is part of NASA's overall effort to find planets and ultimately life beyond our solar system. It combines the light from the twin Keck telescopes to make high resolution measurements of stars and galaxies and to measure ...

The Kepler Mission, a NASA Discovery mission, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or nearby the habitable zone.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array is a pathfinder mission that will open the high energy X-ray sky for sensitive study for the first time. This mission is part of SMD's Astrophysics Explorers program.

Planck is imaging minor variations relevant in the Cosmic Background Radiation over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck is providing information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical issues, such as testing theories of the early universe ...

Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly known as SIRTF) conducts infrared astronomy from space. From an unusual heliocentric orbit designed to keep its sensitive instruments away from Earth's radiated heat, Spitzer has detected several distant objects, including several supermassive black holes, that ...

Suzaku (formerly Astro-E2) provides powerful tools to use the Universe as a laboratory for unraveling complex, high-energy processes and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions. This mission is part of SMD's Astrophysics Explorers program. This mission was awarded via ...

Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer is a three-telescope space observatory for studying the position, brightness, and physical properties of gamma ray bursts. Although gamma ray bursts are the largest known explosions in the Universe, outshining the rest of the Universe ...

XMM-Newton is an X-ray astrophysics observatory that enables astronomers to conduct sensitive X-ray spectroscopic observations of a wide variety of cosmic sources. This mission is part of SMD's Physics of the Cosmos program.