Paris, DEC 8: After the presumed loss of a US scouting mission to Mars underscored the risks of space exploration, Europe will make its own high-stakes gamble on Friday, launching a powerful new rocket taking aloft the most sensitive X-ray satellite ever made.The European Space Agency (ESA) has staked 689 million dollars on the X-Ray Multimirror Mission (XMM) observatory, designed to scour the skies for signs on the origins and future of our violent universe. Its gold-mirrored eyes will peer into the enigma of black holes, where matter, light and possibly time itself are engulfed.It will rake over the scorched remains of supernovae, stars which expired in a titanic explosion and whose material may go to create new planets and stars. And it will explore ``vampire stars'', whose intense gravitational fields can suck matter out of their neighbours.The XMM is the biggest science satellite ever built by ESA, a consortium set up by 12 countries with the goal of ensuring that Western Europe, the fount ofmodern science, should not left behind in space. ESA proudly claims its brainchild will be even more powerful than the Chandra, the US X-ray telescope taken aloft by the space shuttle in July, which has already astounded astronomers with the clarity of its pictures.The 3.8-tonne, 10-metre-long XMM mainly comprises three long tubes, each lined with 58 concentric sets of wafer-thin gold mirrors to reflect X-rays back to detectors at the far end of the pipes. Making the flimsy millimetre-thick mirrors and then lining them up has been an exhausting and exacting business. Each was shaped to an accuracy of a thousandth of a millimetre and then polished to a smoothness a thousand times better than that. The mirrors were then packaged within each other like nested Russian dolls, then focused and aligned to an accuracy of a quarter of the width of a human hair. This accuracy means that ESA scientists can now pack many more mirrors into the same volume than before, thus hugely adding to the power to collect X-rays,says XMM Project Manager Rob Laine.Many hopes and much money are riding on the successful launch of this instrument, designed to operate for 10 years. The high risks of space missions were underscored by the loss on September 23 of a 125-million-dollar US scout craft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, just as it was about to land.Its team-mate, the 165-million-dollar Mars Polar Lander, touched down near Mars' South Pole last Friday, but its future looks uncertain after it failed to respond to radio signals .The XMM's lift off is scheduled for Friday from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, with the Ariane-5, ESA's most powerful rocket, undergoing a crucial first commercial launch.The launcher got off to an ill-starred start when it blew up on its maiden flight, on June 4 1996. It has since undergone two successful ``qualification'' missions. Ariane-5 is a heavy lifter, designed to place payloads of up to 6.8 tonnes into geostationary orbits.ESA's workhorse is Ariane-4, which has been inoperation since 1988 and can carry payloads of up to 4.5 tonnes. X-ray astronomy studying emissions high in the energy spectrum that are invisible to the naked eye is one of the most exciting areas of astrophysics. It is also one of the youngest. X-ray emissions from space are filtered out by the Earth's atmosphere, and the phenomenon was only detected in the 1950s, when sounding rockets pioneered the exploration of space.
