[verzali]

You don't need much more than you've listed to operate it, for sure. Especially for a spacecraft that's fairly old and should be behaving in well established ways.

Only thing I can think is the Chandra project is funding researchers (e.g Postdocs etc) from it's budget. Otherwise they're being really inefficient and could surely keep it running with a quarter of the staffing (but knowing NASA, that's a possibility...).

Also possible there's a lot of instrument specialists, but that's not a full time job. Perhaps they are including part time roles in that 180 job total.