Spitzer's image called Orion
Subscribe to Space in Orbit for more articles like this! This account is part of the Space in Orbit team!
https://www.youtube.com/@Space_the_limit
Spitzer Space Telescope or Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) was an infrared space telescope launched in 2003 which ended its operations on 30th January 2020. It was the third telescope launched to space dedicated to infrared astronomy, after IRAS (1983) and ISO (1995-1998). It was also the first using an Earth-trailing orbit that would be later used by the Kepler space telescope.
It was intended to last only 2.5 years with an expectations that the mission could get 5 years or even more after that. This could extend until the liquid helium to cool the telescope (to make the temperature that the infrared instruments need) exhausted, which happened on 15th May 2009. Without this, many of the instruments were no longer usable. However, the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate as well as before the helium had exhausted. This continued to be used until January of 2020, with the Spitzer Warm Mission. During this period both cameras worked at 28.7 K and scientists predicted that it wouldn't experince no degredation at this temperature. Spitzer's data is sotred at the Infrared Science Archive (or IRSA for short). Spitzer Telescope cost US$776 million and was launched on 25th August 2003 at 05:35:39 UTC from Cape Canaveral SLC-17B aboard a Delta II rocket. It was placed in Earth orbit drifting away 0.1 AU per year. The primary mirror is 33 inches in diameter and is made out of beryllium. It was cooled to 5.5 K. Spitzer Space Telescope carried 3 instruments on board:
- Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) - this is an infrared camera which is operated by four wavelengths. Each module used a 256x256 pixel detector. The main researcher wasGiovanni Fazio of Center of Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. The flight hardware was built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
- Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) - this is a spectrometer with four sub-modules. Each used a 128x128 pixel detector. The main researcher was James R. Houckof Cornell University. The hardware was built by Ball Aerospace.
- Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) - these are three detector arrays in the mid- to far-infrared (128x128 pixels). The main researcher was George H. Rieke of the University of Arizona. The hardware was also built by Ball Aerospace.
All of these instruments used liquid helium and when that exhausted only the two shorter wavelenght in IRAC continued into the Warm Mission.
First Images[]
The fisrt released images of Spitzer really showed how powerful this telescope was. In 2005 Spitzer became the first telescope to get light directly from exoplanets, named Hot Jupiters (HD 209458 and TrES-1b). It captured light but didn't resolve it into images.This telescope discovered in April 2005 that Cohen-kuhi Tau/4 has a planetary diskthat was vastly younger and containd less mass than theorized.
Planet Hunter[]
Just like Kepler, Spitzer also became a planet junter. Because of a creatively tweak to its hardware it started to discover new planets. Some examples are HD 219134 b in 2015 which was shown to be a rocky planet 1.5 times bigger than Earth in a 3 day orbit around it's star, located 13.000 light-years away from us. Spitzer was also used to discover 5 of the 7 planets that orbit TRAPPIST-1, all that are about the size of Earth and really likely rocky. Three of them are in the habitable zone and capable of supporting liquid water. Using the transit method Spitzer estimated the mass and density of the inner six planets.