[Maggie's blog] A Fond Farewell to ROSAT

It’s time for me to be nostalgic about another satellite. Last time it was the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer which I really started my career in websites/education/outreach on. This time, it’s the Röntgensatellit, or ROSAT, a German-led X-ray telescope. When I was an intern here, my first job was to add captions to our archive of ROSAT images!

ROSAT exceeded its 5-year mission by four years and was finally turned off in 1999. Now, 12 years later, ROSAT is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime in October 2011 and break up.

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