ROSAT-Creating a Satellite

Abstract

X-ray astronomy is a very young branch of celestial research. Few scientists gave it serious thought before the discovery of the first cosmic x-ray sources outside the solar system, in the summer of 1962. No wonder the pioneers in this area-as in radio astronomy a few decades earlier-came mostly from other fields. While radio astronomy had relied on high-frequency engineers and scientists, the pioneers of x-ray astronomy came from nuclear physics or from the study of cosmic rays.