(MSNBC) Scientists are using X-ray vision to focus on mysteries that the comic-book heroes of the 1930s didn’t even know existed: black holes, dark matter and the most violent explosions in the universe. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, ready for launch on the space shuttle Columbia, should make that superhuman vision at least 10 times sharper.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL leap in X-ray astronomy represented by Chandra is equivalent to the leap from the naked eye to Galileo’s first telescope, or from ground-based observatories to the Hubble Space Telescope, says Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science.
 
“Chandra has the potential to equal or even surpass these examples of previous major leaps in scientific capability,” he says. “It will study the most extreme conditions in the universe — the near environs of black holes, the most powerful continuous sources of energy in space, known as quasars, and it will test the laws of physics under conditions impossible to duplicate on the earth.”
 
NASA ranks Chandra as one of its four “great observatories” in space, along with Hubble, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory and the yet-to-be-launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility.
 
Chandra, which is named after the late Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, has an incredible angular resolution of 0.25 to 0.5 arc-seconds. How incredible is that? It’s the equivalent of reading a newspaper from a half-mile away, or seeing a stop sign from 12 miles away. “We can make Superman jealous, I guess, with our X-ray vision,” says Ken Ledbetter, director of the mission and payload development division at NASA’s Office of Space Science.