In 1962 a scientific team led by Italian American physicist Ricardo Giacconi (1931–) and his colleagues launched an X-ray telescope into space aboard an Aerobee rocket. The flight lasted only a few minutes, but during the time it was above the absorptive layers of the atmosphere, the telescope detected the first X-rays from interstellar space, including a strong source coming from the direction of the constellation Scorpius. Subsequent flights during the 1960s detected X-rays from many other sources, including one toward the constellation Cygnus and another toward Taurus (the Crab Nebula).