Area Teacher to Do Launch With NASA

An Adolfo Camarillo High School teacher Monday was one of two people to earn the right to officially name the world’s newest and strongest X-ray telescope.

Jatila Van der Veen, who teaches physics and astronomy, won a NASA-run essay contest in which she suggested the telescope be called Chandra, in honor of the late Indian American Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

“I just got lucky,” Van der Veen said.

But competing against 6,000 entries from 61 countries and winning the contest involved more than just luck. Van der Veen said she spent a mere 15 minutes crafting her one-paragraph entry, but it was more than enough to impress the judges. After all, 59 of the entries suggested the same name.

“One of the things that she pointed out was ‘Chandra’ means ‘moon’ in Sanskrit, so there is a double connection to astronomy,” said Harvey Tananbaum, the director of the newly named Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass., which will run the telescope for NASA.

Van der Veen shares the honor to name the telescope with essay co-winner Tyrel Johnson, a 10th-grader from Idaho--who also chose the name Chandra.

Van der Veen will get a free trip for her family to Cape Canaveral, Fla., in April to watch the launch of the 10,000-pound telescope on the space shuttle Columbia.

Because X-rays do not penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere, they can only be observed from outer space. The Chandra telescope, which is 50 to 100 times more sensitive than any earlier X-ray telescope, is expected to collect information for at least the next five years.

“We expect the quality of the discoveries to be comparable to what Hubble has done in optical and ultraviolet [research],” said Tananbaum, who began developing the telescope proposal 22 years ago. “We have very great expectations.”

Chandra is expected to help astronomers better understand the structure and evolution of the universe by studying supernovas and matter falling into black holes.

That’s why using Chandrasekhar’s name is fitting, Van der Veen said. He is regarded as one of the leading astrophysicists of the century, winning a Nobel Prize in 1983 for his studies of the structure and evolution of stars. He also made contributions to the theory of black holes. Immigrating in 1935, the India native was a University of Chicago professor until his death in 1995.

Along with an interest in the scientist’s discoveries, Van der Veen also has an affinity for his country. A grant from the Indian government gave Van der Veen an opportunity to study dance there for a year before she went into teaching. Van der Veen, who is originally from New York, was a dancer until she decided to pursue science.

“The only other thing that captured my attention the way dance did was applied math,” she said.

Van der Veen, who has a master’s degree in geophysics, started the astronomy program at Camarillo High School.

She also does research and helps develop curriculum at UC Santa Barbara, where her 17-year-old son, Dave, studies computer science.