NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is a technological marvel, featuring many innovations never before used on a space mission. It may seem like a contradiction, but Spitzer needs to be simultaneously "cold" and "warm" to function properly. Learn how Spitzer achieves this balance with the:.
The Universe is continually radiating a wealth of information to Earth, sending signals in a wide-spectrum of light. However, not all of these messages reach the ground.
In space, any object that has a temperature above zero Kelvin - A new virtual reality experience lets users get a taste of what it's like to explore the cosmos with the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of NASA's four Great Observatories. California Institute of Technology.
Mission Lyman Spitzer Jr. Mission Overview Technology History Science. May 3rd, December 18th, Solar System. January 13th, Planet Formation.
January 10th, July 24th, Stars and Nebulae. July 22nd, January 7th, May 5th, October 3rd, In flight, the spacecraft's orientation was controlled to keep the telescope in the shade of the spacecraft's large solar panels.
Check out this image from the Hubble telescope, revisited in infrared. The "warm launch" idea is related to a key requirement for an infrared telescope: it must be as cold as possible, so its measurements and images would not be swamped by infrared radiation from the telescope structure itself. During its primary mission, Spitzer's instruments were kept about 5 degrees above absolute zero degrees Fahrenheit, or degrees Celsius by a supply of liquid helium.
But, in a move that economized on launch operations costs, the helium system did not begin actively cooling the telescope until Spitzer had spent several months in space, cooling "passively" as much as possible by slowly radiating heat to space.
Spitzer's unique orbit is an Earth-trailing path that goes around the sun, not around Earth. Over the years, Spitzer was allowed to drift farther and farther from Earth , so infrared radiation from Earth would not interfere with sensitive observations.
At launch, the telescope had three instruments: an infrared array camera IRAC , an infrared spectrograph, and a multiband imaging photometer. Spitzer was launched on a Delta rocket not a Space Shuttle on August 25, The telescope was officially renamed from the more technical SIRTF to the Spitzer Space Telescope four months after launch, when it was shown to be working properly.
Spitzer's observational life turned out to have three phases: the "cryogenic" cold phase, when the instruments were cooled by liquid helium as originally designed; the "warm" phase, beginning in after the liquid helium ran out; and the "beyond" phase, from to The mission was originally expected to last two and a half years with the cryogenic instruments functioning.
By using the liquid helium coolant economically, engineers stretched the cryogenic phase to five and a half years. The liquid helium finally ran out in May Spitzer was back to passive cooling. Instrument temperatures went up a few degrees, to around 30 kelvins degrees below zero in Celsius, below in Fahrenheit. But even while "warm," Spitzer could still use two channels of its infrared camera to observe targets such as asteroids in our solar system, dusty stars, planet-forming disks, gas-giant planets and distant galaxies, according to a NASA press release issued as the warm phase began.
In addition, Spitzer was still able to see through the dust that permeates our galaxy and blocks visible-light views.
The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in and retired in Spitzer is million kilometers million miles away from Earth, or about 1. The Spitzer Space Telescope was named in honor of astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, who promoted the idea of orbiting observatories in the s. As an infrared observatory, Spitzer collected light from regions of space that are hidden from optical telescopes, and it could detect light emitted from cooler objects.
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