History

1964-1974: First launches, early computation

The early years of the CSR were dominated by a rapid launch sequence of high altitude balloons, sounding rockets and orbital missions; some years saw as many of five or more launches of CRS equipment. In many cases, the experiments on balloons or rockets could be recovered, refurbished or upgraded, and be flow again to perform more observations. For example, a balloon-borne X-ray telescope was launched three times 1966; it free-fell from 40000 ft after the ballon burst on its third flight, and was launched five more times between 1967 and 1969 from both the US and Australia. It was temporarily lost after splashing down after the eighth flight until it was washed ashore on a beach in New Zealand nine months later. Some of the film on board could still be recovered and analyzed. CSR contributed equipment to several bigger space missions, including Apollo 17, too. 

CSR researchers also used the best available tools on the ground, e.g. by performing (for the time) modern computer simulations of colliding galaxies. An example is the hugely influential paper by Toomre & Toomre (1972) that is still cited about 100 times per year today.

1974-1984: Major missions and X-ray timing

Several major space missions were launched in this decade by the CSR or with important CRS contributions. Best known are probably Voyager I and II, that continue to operate today and have left the solar system into interstellar space. Others include pathfinding high-energy missions like SAS-3 and the Einstein observatory, which discovered many X-ray bursting systems. A team at CSR lead by Clark, Canizares, and Schattenburg built the Bragg crystal spectrometer for Einstein and the foundation for high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy; that group continued to develop instruments for spectroscopy and later contributed one of the spectrometers for Chandra.

Beyond instruments, there was a strong interest in the new research field of X-ray transients. CSR scientists worked on explaining all the new phenomena discovered with the new instruments, e.g. developing theories for magnetic breaking breaking and X-ray pulsars. This research was supported by CSR’s first own optical telescope, dedicated to localize the X-ray sources discovered by the SAS-3 space mission.

1984-1994: The cadence of launches slows down

One of the defining moments for space flight in this decade was the accident that lead to the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986. On board was the MIT PhD graduate and scientist astronaut Ronald McNair who died in the accident. In a December 1986 Building 37 was named after him.

In general, the number of space missions declined in this decade, but CSR contributed to the hugely successful Magellan mission, which mapped the surface of Venus. New technologies were pioneered to gain new scientific insights, for example, CCD development allowed very fast data collection so that  a team from MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department and the Physics Department  could measure the thickness of the atmosphere of Pluto as it passed in front of a distant star. On the ground, the radio astronomy group at the Haystack observatory, which, like many of the early researchers at the CSR, originally grew out of technology developments during World War II, observed the first “Einstein ring” - light from the very distant universe that is distorted by the gravitation of another massive object in the foreground.

1994-2004: Big observatories

The CSR contributed to several of the major astrophysics observatories in this decade, providing a wide range of contributions from engineers and scientists to many different fields of astrophysics and many different types of instruments. On the ground, the CSR helped to build to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which started construction in 1994 with the goal to detect the gravitational waves from merging black holes; CSR also joined the Magellan consortium (unrelated to the Magellan spacecraft) that operates two 6.5m class telescopes in Chile, giving MIT scientists access to faint and far away objects.

In space, the CSR contributed to three of the major high-energy missions of the decade, RXTE and HETE-2 as well as the Chandra X-ray Observatory, that celebrated its 25th year in flight in 2024 with scientists and engineers at MIT still supporting operations and data analysis.

2004-2014: Kavli Institute

In 2004, the Kavli foundation (https://www.space.mit.edu/about/kavli-foundation/) funded a major endowment and the Center for Space Research (CSR) became the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

Compared to the early years of the CSR, the way the federal government funded space missions and research had changed. Missions grew larger and more complex, development timelines lengthened, and funding mechanisms became more formalized and risk-averse. Thus, substantial development and engineering became necessary to even prepare a mission proposal to NASA. The Kavli endowment provides MKI with that flexibility.

In this decade, MKI expanded its research into exoplanets - planets that orbit stars other than our own Sun; maybe life will be found on one of those planets one day. MKI began fundamental research and planning and development for a space mission dedicated to finding those planets: TESS.

Ground-based instruments were built and commissioned for the Magellan telescopes (FIRE) and for a study of the 21 cm line, which is used to measure hydrogen in the universe in galaxies all the way out to the Big Bang.

2014-now

Today, MKI scientists continue to do research on a wide range of astrophysical topics, engineers develop new ways to improve existing technology and build new instruments, and a wide range of MKI staff supports several ongoing missions from small in-house projects to large NASA observatories.