Infrared End of an Era

The Spitzer Space Telescope is warming up. Just one day after the launch of Herschel, a large but “warm” far-infrared telescope, the liquid helium cooling Spitzer ran out at 18:30 UT on 15 May 2009. This is 2090 days after the launch of Spitzer and 33 years after I starting working on the project. My first involvement was as a member of the Focal Plane Instruments and Science Team (FIRST) in 1976, studying what instrument complement should be carried on the Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). The shuttle version of SIRTF would have had a two week mission. In 1984 I was chosen as an Interdisciplinary Scientist and SIRTF became the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, now a free-flyer, still launched by the shuttle but with a 2000 liter dewar to be re-filled with liquid helium using the shuttle every two years. This would have required a space tug to get SIRTF from its 900 km altitude orbit, lower it to the shuffle’s 300 km orbit, and then return it to 900 km after the refill. The actual version flown had only a 300 liter dewar and lasted for more than 5.7 years, in an orbit around the Sun that has now taken it more than 100 million km form the Earth.

At the JPL open house the WISE booth was next to the Spitzer booth, and Spitzer had an infrared TV camera. The picture below shows myself on the left and my daughter on the right. Her nose looks dark because she “painted” it with a piece of ice, and cold objects look dark in the IR image.

IR image: I am holding a camera on the left, my daughter is on the right with a cold nose.