(Daily News Scan - DNS English) Spitzer Space Telescope
NASA’s Spitzer Mission, which studied the universe in infrared light for more than 16 years, will come to an end soon this year. Since, it is low on fuel and has been drifting away from Earth for few years now; the mission has been decided to terminate.
In this DNS we will know about the Spitzer Space telescope and the findings of its.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003. Spitzer was originally built to last for a minimum of 2.5 years, but it continued operating for a much longer time of 16 years.
The Spitzer Space Telescope is a space-borne observatory, one of the elements of NASA’s Great Observatories that include the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray. It studied the universe in infrared light. Using different infrared wavelengths, Spitzer was able to see and reveal features of the universe including objects that were too cold to emit visible light. Spitzer was designed to focus on infrared light, which lets scientists see through dust that hides the view of other types of telescopes. These included exoplanets, brown dwarfs and cold matter found in the space between stars. During its tenure, the spacecraft has been used to tackle astronomical puzzles like how stars and planets form.
One of the unique features of Spitzer is its orbit. Spitzer orbits the sun, tagging along behind Earth and slipping a bit farther away from us each year. Spitzer is about a third of an orbit behind Earth, so the sun doesn’t blocks the communications. Spitzer was launched with three cryogenically cooled instruments. In a new and innovative launch configuration, the telescope was launched warm and passively cooled during the first 3 months of the mission. The instruments were cooled directly with liquid helium. The liquid helium also vented into the telescope, passively cooling the entire system.
The mission cryogenic lifetime was designed for a minimum of 2.5 years but lasted more than two times longer, with the cryogen being depleted after 5.5 years on May 15, 2009. After the depletion of the cryogen on May 15, 2009, Spitzer began a new warm mission.
Spitzer also studied some of the most distant galaxies ever detected. The light from these galaxies reached us after traveling for billions of years. Hubble and Spitzer in 2016 identified and studied the most distant galaxy ever observed. With the help of these two telescopes, scientists were able to see a bright infant galaxy as it was over 13.4 billion years ago, roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 5% of its current age.
Spitzer's most iconic work was characterizing the seven exoplanets orbiting the star called TRAPPIST-1. Spitzer's work has made the TRAPPIST-1 solar system one of the most familiar to exoplanets scientists and the people who are interested in space science. Spitzer helped the scientist find out about a huge number of stars that are very nearby to our solar system, surrounded by dust.
Spitzer has been named after the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer Jr. He was one of the 20th century's great scientists. Lyman Spitzer Jr. proposed that an observatory be put in space to avoid the blurring effects of our atmosphere. This effort led to the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and ultimately the telescope named in his honor, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
