NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope is enjoying a second life and taking some spectacular new photos of our universe according to Wired.
The telescope, launched in 2003, is an infrared observatory. Infrared light is emitted by warm objects: dust, stars, gas, planets, and so on. That includes the telescope itself: unless cooled, the mirror and the rest of the telescope will glow brightly in the infrared, making it impossible to do any science.
The telescope was cooled by liquid helium for its first few years in orbit. However, the coolant ran out in May of this year. That left a sun shade that keeps it passively cooled to about 30K (-400 F) , so two of the detectors are still running just fine. The two detectors took the new picture and delivered it to NASA scientists for study.
“The performance of the two short wavelength channels of Spitzer’s infrared array camera is essentially unchanged from what it was before the observatory’s liquid helium was exhausted,” said Doug Hudgins, the Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a press release. “To put that in perspective, that means Spitzer’s sensitivity at those wavelengths is still roughly the same as a 30-meter ground-based telescope.”
Infrared imaging lets Spitzer see and look through dust, which appears blue. Young stars can be seen forming beneath dusty blue clouds, and the orange swirls are mainly hot gas.
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