Spitzer Space Telescope

December 20, 2003 12:33 AM

The first images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility and renamed after astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr., were released on Thursday. Launched on August 25, it obtains images by detecting the infrared energy radiated by objects in space, and it will drift behind the Earth as the planet orbits the sun.
posted by homunculus (3 comments total)

Spitzer will be the final mission in NASA's Great Observatories Program - a family of four orbiting observatories, each observing the Universe in a different kind of light (visible, gamma rays, X-rays, and infrared). Other missions in this program include the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory(CXO).

Go Spitzer!

Spitzer's predecessor was the IRAS satellite which was responsible for many beautiful images including this one of our galaxy and the hell-like star-forming regions in Orion. So, even better stuff is to come...
posted by vacapinta at 12:46 AM on December 20, 2003

wow the universe is pretty!
posted by mcsweetie at 7:23 AM on December 20, 2003

New Portraits of Spiral Galaxies from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
posted by homunculus at 10:57 AM on December 22, 2003