As reported by NASA, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer has made its last observation, on January 3^rd this year. The spacecraft, launched in December 1995, had a tremendous impact on the study of accreting neutron stars, which has been celebrated this week with a special session at the 219^th AAS meeting in Austin, Texas. RXTE played a very personal role for me, having practically made my career; my PhD thesis was largely based on early observations of a high-magnetic field accretion-powered pulsar. Since then I've analysed many thousands of hours of data on millisecond pulsars, thermonuclear burst sources, and other exotica, and most of my published work has been based on these analyses. The loss of RXTE means the end to fast X-ray timing for the time being, at least until the much-anticipated launch of India's ASTROSAT satellite.

Labels: 2012, missions