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What’s in a name? What happened to the XRA Group?

June 10th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

The group started off as the “Space Research Group” in the 1960s. Some time in the late 60s or early 70s it changed its name to the “X-ray Astronomy Group” or XRA Group. This description stayed for almost 3 decades.

In the early 90s, when the new University Space Research Centre concept became a reality, part of the group focusing on space instrumentation split off to become, variously, the “Space Research Group”, the “Space Science and Instrumentation Group” and the “Space Projects and Instrumentation Group”.

The original XRA Group gained an extra letter about 10 years ago to become the  confusingly-named XROA = ”X-ray and Observational Astronomy Group”.

Corrections and clarifications welcome!

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