COBE turns 21
Adieu, WMAP
September 10, 2010WISE gets new NEOs for its birthday
December 17, 2010
Today (18 Nov) marks 21 years since the COBE launch. 21st birthdays in the US are often marked by binge drinking. So we could have a joke:
Spacecraft walks into a bar, and says “Bartender, I just turned 21.”
Bartender: “Great, what’ll you have?”
Spacecraft: “Give me 700 liters of liquid helium.”
nwright
Ned Wright, 65 years old, is a professor at UCLA. He did far-infrared observations using a 102-cm balloon-borne telescope for his PhD thesis, and has since observed with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, and the space-based COBE, WMAP, Spitzer and WISE missions.
1 Comment
I was getting Kobe confused with COBE (and was forgetting just what great discoveries the mission made), so I just dug up this link:
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/
The site also has some cool (ha!) info on the cryogenics & fluids engineering needed to make the COBE (and other infrared) missions work.
Thanks for the reminder on this, Dr. Wright. 21 years? Time flies….