For our purposes, that includes brown dwarfs and exoplanets, but the observatory has also excelled at studying distant galaxies, including (in conjunction with Hubble observations) the most distant galaxy yet observed, GN-z11, which is seen in the direction of Ursa Major as it was 13.4 billion years in the past. The beauty of working at infrared wavelengths is that you can see things that are too cold to emit much visible light. Image: The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility or SIRTF) is readied for launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, in 2003. We got more than 16 years of use out of Spitzer, another case among many of a mission’s science team working all the angles to keep their craft alive.
#Spitzer space telescope full
With a full stock of coolant, the spacecraft could maintain temperatures as low as minus 267 degrees Celsius, so yes, that’s ‘cold.’ But Spitzer functioned a long way from Earth, so that even the ‘warm’ mission could operate at minus 244° C, and that enabled continued observations in two infrared wavelengths.
‘Warm’ and ‘cold’ are obviously relative terms when we talk about objects in space. The infrared observatory lasted longer than anyone expected and continued to function even after exhausting its helium coolant in 2009, at which point the ‘cold mission’ ended, but the ‘warm mission’ would last over a decade. So many good conversations, some serious interviews, and a growing enthusiasm for interstellar flight.īut Spitzer had my attention because it was the next mission, one of the Great Observatory missions which included the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Spitzer itself. I remember hot Pasadena weather, a conversation with aerospace legend Adrian Hooke (he was a member of the Kennedy Space Center launch team for Apollo 9, 10, 11 and 12, among much else), a rousing talk with Humphrey “Hoppy” Price about interstellar possibilities. The observatory was launched on the 25th of August, 2003. I was making a trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of the research for my Centauri Dreams book when I noticed on a monitor a countdown - still in days - for the launch of Spitzer, then known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). The Spitzer Space Telescope, which is to end its mission on January 30, has a special place in my memory.
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