If like me you are a 3D printing and an astronomy fan, and you have time to spare this weekend, there’s something out there you might want to try: printing and assembling your truly own (tiny) Chandra X-ray Observatory.
What’s Chandra, anyway? It’s an amazing X-ray telescope, launched by NASA in 1999, that has made possible (and available for public analysis) an incredible amount of data on near and far-away space objects. It’s a space telescope, by the way: since X-rays are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, Chandra is located up to an altitude of 139,000 km (86,500 mi) from the Earth surface. Chandra’s data processing and distribution are handled by The Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA – where all repositories are located.
For more information about this true science wonder, visit the official website. (And if you’re so fascinated by what you see there, remember you can learn on Coursera how to download and analyse those files by yourself with SAOImage DS9 Software: I will talk about it in another post).
Back to the 3D printing. For the download of the necessary files to built your own go here, while the instructions are available at this link. They’re not difficult to follow.
Once you’re done, if you display it in public remember to inform the creators of the model and print their tags – they do deserve the praise!