American Science and Engineering, Inc

Formed in 1958, AS&E began as a developer of scientific instruments for NASA, founded by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1959, future Nobel laureate Dr. Riccardo Giacconi joined AS&E and put together an elite X-ray astronomy team. In the coming decades, Dr. Giacconi's team made a succession of scientific breakthroughs, including the discovery of the first known X-ray source outside the solar system (1962) and the first successful soft X-ray photograph of the sun (1965).