The team responsible for the Chandra X-ray Observatory has received one of the Smithsonian Institution's most distinguished honors -- the National Air and Space Museum's Trophy. Established in 1985, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in scientific or technological endeavors relating to air and space. MIT and several other organizations partner with NASA on the Chandra project. Chandra's High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETGS) was built by MIT with Bruno Rossi Professor Claude Canizares as principal investigator. X-ray spectra are recorded with the spectroscopic array of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS). The ACIS detector was conceived and developed for NASA by Pennsylvania State University and MIT.
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The late alumna Katharine Dexter McCormick (SB in biology, 1904) was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame on October 26. Ms. McCormick, a native of Dexter, MI, gave MIT its first residence hall for women, Stanley McCormick Hall, named in memory of her husband. When Ms. McCormick died in 1967 at age 92, she bequeathed the Institute more than $25 million. She wrote in her will, "I have wished to express my gratitude to the Institute for its advanced policy of scientific education for women. This policy gave me the opportunity to obtain the scientific training which has been of inestimable value to me throughout my life."
Ms. McCormick was a founding officer of the League of Women Voters and national treasurer of the Woman Suffrage Movement. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 6, 2000.
