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Have you ever wondered what the earth would look like out of a space shuttle? Have you ever looked up at the stars and thought that you could be an astronaut? Well, there’s nothing saying you can’t. In fact, that very thing happened on July 22, 1999. Five people were given the opportunity to fly into space and remain there for 4 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes.

What’s so fascinating is that this is the first time in history that a woman was the Commander of the flight. Eileen Collins took command of the Space Shuttle Columbia and flew to the stars along with 4 other crew members, Jeff Ashby, Steve Hawley, Catherine Coleman, and Michel Tognini.

The purpose of this mission was to release their cargo, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, into orbit. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is an X-ray telescope that is intended to observe all of the amazing things that make up the universe. The universe is always changing with temperatures that can reach millions of degrees and objects that move at the speed of light. There are also magnetic fields that are so strong that they cause some stars to crack. All of this will hopefully be captured in X-ray images, which will help scientists to understand how things in the universe work. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, will now be able to study things that they could never study in a laboratory. They believe that the Chandra X-ray Observatory will offer information on topics that they don’t yet have answers to. For instance, they are hoping to find out what and where “Dark Matter” is in our universe, and what makes explosive activity occur in many distant galaxies. This is all very exciting, because it’s opening up the possibility for thousands of questions to be answered, and thousands more to be asked.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been placed in an elliptical, or oval shaped, orbit. An orbit around the Earth simply means that the object goes around the Earth, and in this case it does so in an oval fashion. So, when the observatory is closest to the Earth, it will be at an altitude of 6,200 miles away from the Earth. When it’s at its farthest, it will be 87,000 miles away and will travel almost 1/3 of the way to the moon. And there it will circle and hopefully give us answers to the fascinating universe that surrounds us.