From The Associated Press, May 18, 2009: Even as one of NASA’s “Great Observatories,” the Hubble Space Telescope, was being repaired this past week, another such orbiting light bucket was running out of coolant and wrapping up its mission.
The Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared observatory launched in 2003 on an expected five-year mission, will still have one partially operable instrument as it goes into a warmer mode. But without its cryogenic cooling system, the bulk of its operations will come to an end.
“We’ve run out of gas,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.
The timing is oddly perfect: A day before Spitzer’s alarms sounded, the European Space Agency launched its scientific successor, a far-infrared telescope called Herschel.
“It is truly a coincidence, believe me, that Herschel has launched within one day of this occurring,” said Morse.
Joining Herschel in the ride into space on an Ariane rocket, which blasted off from French Guiana, is an ESA telescope called Planck, which will probe the cosmic microwave background radiation. Earlier telescopes have observed the background radiation, which is at about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, but Planck will do it with resolution that is 10 times as great. The goal is to understand the origin of structure in the early universe, as primordial lumps in the hot, smooth cosmos gradually became the seeds of galaxies.
Both of the European telescopes are destined for the gravitationally stable point known as L2, an orbit about a million miles from Earth.
-Joel Achenbach
