Research

Since its founding, the institute has build and launched many different types of missions on balloons, rockets, and as free-flying satellites in space. The Institute was first called the “Center for Space Research” (CSR) before it became the “MIT Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Science” (MKI) as described in more detail in the History.

The Rocket Experiment Demonstration of a Soft X-ray Polarimeter (REDSoX Polarimeter) is a NASA-funded sounding rocket payload. A sounding rocket is a suborbital flight platform.  Since X-rays cannot get through the Earth’s atmosphere, they have to be measured from space.  A sounding rocket carries a telescope just out of the atmosphere and provides roughly five minutes of targeted pointing above the atmosphere before coming

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is one of NASA’s “great observatories”, together with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Compton Gamma ray observatory. Chandra observes the X-ray emission that is coming from some of the hottest and brightest objects in the universe, from the flares on stars to the largest clusters

MKI led the construction of and now operates NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. TESS searches the entire sky for exoplanets with orbits precisely aligned with our line of sight so that they “transit,” or pass in front of their stars, and block a small fraction of the star’s light. TESS measures the brightness