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Spitzer Space Telescope: In Memorial
Because 2020 only takes and never gives, I’m here to bring you the news that yesterday, after more than 16 years of amazing science, the Spitzer Space Telescope was decommissioned.
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Launched in 2003, Spitzer started with liquid Helium coolant that allowed it to see far into the infrared, revealing in high resolution aspects of the sky that had only been hinted at by the earlier IRAS telescope (which coincidentally is the telescope that had a near miss over Pittsburgh earlier this week).
In 2009, Spitzer ran out of coolant. Up until this point, it had an imager, spectrograph, and multiband photometer that could measure brightnesses across multiple colors. Only the imaging instrument still functioned without coolant, but thanks to Spitzer’s creative orbit, the imager could be kept cool enough through passive techniques that Spitzer could keep doing science at infrared wavelengths beyond the reach of other telescopes.
Like the Sun observing STEREO spacecraft, Spitzer was put into a solar orbit that was just different enough from Earth’s that Spitzer has slowly lagged further and further away from our planet. This means the spacecraft only has to worry about heat from a single source — The Sun. Thanks to the vacuum of space, most of the Sun’s heat could be blocked with a sunshield that…
