Would you be interested in renting time on X-ray equipped space telescope?

Hello Salvatore,

first, I am positively surprised that such a special and expensive research satellite could be made available to amateur astronomer.

a ) What can one see with it ?

Using Wikipedia I tried to get a more educated picture of what x-ray is used for in astronomy.
Then I looked at  Google Sky, including the NASA Chandra X -Ray telescope overlays.
Here I found examples of composite images (optical, infrared, x-ray) from the Chandra data base.
Basically, X-ray provides you a high energy electron spectrum (just below Gamma-ray),  which is not visible to ground - based telescopes.

b) Operation
As with all remote telescopes, space based observatories operate under a schedule, including the preparation of the imaging instruments setup.
I have no idea what is required here.
The satellite operator would have to provide some guiding instructions or a standard catalogue.

c) Observational results
Such a satellite must be operated in a very economical way, because any change of orientation costs energy/fuel, which is limited onboard.
Most probably observation requests are grouped in some way, the requested imaging results are therefore not immediately available, especially
if the satellite is shared with professional astronomers/ agencies.
(The resulting data formats are hopefully compatible with typicall amateur astronomer tools)

e) Renting
NASA, ESA or other agency satellite data bases can be accessed free of charge, so the question is, why renting a satellite for imaging?
Of course, there might be interesting objects still missing on existing data bases, but one need  a good reason /background to pin-point a
X-ray telescope onto new targets,  especially when you have to pay for it.

But this could be interesting for the Astrobin community.
Observational requests could be grouped/prepared/discussed in a special forum

f) my ad/hoc summary

X- ray is a very interesting complementary window into the Sky and still full of surprises/discoveries, even for professional astronomers.
But I would have definitely to get some more education into Astrophysics in order to value this new frontier.
I would not just pay  for another pretty picture (in artificial coloring)
Cheers Wanni

Hello Salvatore,
yes I would be interested.. depending on this price fo course.
I have special interests in WR stars, so X ray observations would be great for this kind of hot and massive stars.
It might be interesting also to observe and get data on pulsars, hot /massive binary and black holes (AGN or stellar bh).
For all of these objets, it seems to me more interesting to get spectra than images..
XRay Imaging can be great also for galaxy clusters in my opinion..
This make a lot of topics..right ?
Stephane

Paddy Gilliland:
Of course knowing the imaging scale will be useful to see if anything can be matched in the visual range.

Paddy, here an example of M1. Question is, are we talking about "Low energy X-ray" or "High energy X-ray" imaging ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_astronomy#/media/File:800crab.png

Stephane Neveu:
For all of these objets, it seems to me more interesting to get spectra than images..

As Stephane said, it depends also on what kind of information you are looking for.

I am sure Salvatore could tell us when he get's more information about the Spacecraft and it's scientific payload
Wanni

Salvatore,
It would depend a bit on the price, but I might have a lot of interest in it.  My key interest would be in looking for black hole emissions and looking at spinning dwarf stars in areas such as M1 and other PN.  It would be interesting to try to make movies of transient phenomena similar to what the ESO recently did in M1.  Keep us posted.
John