Science

Without question, the unexpected end of Chandra would be heartbreaking for astronomers, and for astronomy. Scientists who use the Earth-orbiting spacecraft as their north star to elucidate the structures of black holes will face layoffs, and there is currently no other observatory capable of achieving the kind of X-ray resolutions Chandra has been obtaining since it reached its cozy spot around our planet in 1999. It is these resolutions, in fact, that have allowed those black hole scientists to study not just the voids themselves, but also many cosmic wanderers with the misfortune of treading too close.

Its nested mirrors smoothed down to the precision of a few atoms make Chandra sensitive enough to follow spaceborne signals back to their very faint sources, a sensitivity even the all-powerful James Webb Space Telescope doesn't have. That's because the JWST actually doesn't work with X-rays at all. Neither does the Hubble Space Telescope, nor the Euclid Space Telescope. In fact, there are actually not many observatories that look at X-rays in general.

The space observatory can identify neutron stars in faraway galaxies that likely remain hidden to our other devices, and it can decode intricacies of stellar explosions so well it's easy to forget how incomprehensible a stellar explosion is to the human mind. Without Chandra, it'd be tough to achieve all of these things, maybe impossible, until someone makes a Chandra 2.0.