On 10 December 1999, the Ariane 504 rocket, which at the time had a lot to make up for after dropping the Clusters mission in the mangroves of French Guiana, pulled out all the stops to place a 4-tonne, 10-metre-high monster into an orbit rising to 114,000 km.
It was the XMM-Newton orbital X-ray observatory, a major mission (Horizon 2000) for the European Space Agency. We then had to let the Y2K bug fever die down and wait until 24 January to receive a slightly blurred but promising image of Doradus.
Scientific operations began in July of the same year, producing an uninterrupted stream of valuable scientific data ever since. This has been made possible by the hard work of teams from ESA and a consortium of 10 European laboratories, the Survey Science Consortium, of which Strasbourg is a member. For the past 25 years, the sources detected by XMM have made a short detour to the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory to be compared and correlated with the data in the VizieR catalogues.
The mission’s initial duration was 2 years, renewable. So 25 years and 6,000 publications later, from renewal to extension, from optimisation to fuel economy, our space veteran is still with us. Some think he’ll be watching us turn the page this decade. What’s certain is that in 2034 it won’t have enough fuel left to run, but in the meantime, we’re very proud to have contributed to 25 years of great science.
More information : XMM-Newton celebrates 25 years of breakthroughs (ESA press release).