Aging Spitzer space telescope to be shut down after 16 years of service, says NASA

 NASA is pulling the plug on one of its great observatories -- the Spitzer Space Telescope -- after 16 years of scanning the universe with infrared eyes.

The end comes Thursday when ground controllers put the aging spacecraft into permanent hibernation.

For years, Spitzer peered through dusty clouds at untold stars and galaxies, uncovered a huge, nearly invisible ring around Saturn, and helped discover seven Earth-size planets around a nearby star.

Spitzer’s last observation was Wednesday. Altogether, Spitzer observed 800,000 celestial targets and churned out more than 36 million raw images as part of the $1.4 billion mission.

Spitzer telescope. Image: NASA

An estimated 4,000 scientists around the world took part in the observations and published nearly 9,000 studies, according to NASA.

“You have to be proud ... when you look back and say, ‘Look at the team that’s operating Spitzer, look at the team that’s contributing to having all of this great science,’ ” said project manager Joseph Hunt.

Designed to last just two and a half to five years, the telescope got increasingly difficult to operate as it drifted farther behind Earth, NASA said. It currently trails Earth by 265 million kilometers, while orbiting the sun.

Also Read: Nasa's Spitzer telescope celebrates its sweet 16 with 10 splendid stellar images

Spitzer will continue to fall even farther behind Earth, posing no threat to another spacecraft or anything else, officials said.

“Although it would be great to be able to operate all of our telescopes forever, this is not possible,” NASA’s astrophysics director Paul Hertz said in an email.

NASA originally planned to decommission Spitzer a few years ago, but put off its demise as the James Webb Space Telescope, a vastly more elaborate infrared observatory, kept getting delayed.

Webb’s launch is now off until at least early next year. This week, the Government Accountability Office warned of further delays because of technical challenges.

It had been costing NASA about $12 million a year lately to keep Spitzer going. Hertz said with “no guarantee” Spitzer would last until Webb’s launch, the decision was made to shut it down now.

Launched in 2003, Spitzer was the last of NASA’s four so-called great observatories. With its infrared instruments, it was able to sense heat coming off celestial objects like night vision goggles, said Suzanne Dodd, a former project manager who now oversees NASA’s Deep Space Network at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

By seeing through dust, “we’re lifting the cosmic veil on the universe,” Dodd said.

Still sending back breathtaking pictures, the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed into orbit in 1990 to observe the cosmos in visible and ultraviolet light; it will celebrate its 30th anniversary in April.

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was launched in 1991, but because of equipment failure was destroyed in a fiery re-entry in 2000. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is still working since its 1999 launch.



from Firstpost Tech Latest News https://ift.tt/38Pflv5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 origins: Should we pay more attention to the lab leak theory and formally investigate it?

Image
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid first appeared at the end of 2019. So what do we know for sure, and what do we need still to find out? We know the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is close to that of bat coronaviruses . Several decades ago its “ancestor” was circulating in bat populations in southern Asia. But there are still many unanswered questions: we don’t know how the virus arrived in Wuhan, how its sequence evolved to allow human infection, and under what conditions it infected the first people who crossed its path. And for each of these stages, we don’t know whether there was a human contribution (direct or indirect). Zoonotic transmission pathways, in other words the pas
Read more

Menstrual cups are cheaper, more sustainable than pads and tampons for women

Image
Every year in America, women spend at least US$2.8 billion on sanitary pads and tampons that can take hundreds of years to decompose . Is there a more economical and environmentally friendly way? To find out, we asked Susan Powers , a professor of sustainable environmental systems at Clarkson University about her work comparing the environmental impact of tampons, sanitary pads and menstrual cups. What is a menstrual cup? A menstrual cup is a type of reusable feminine hygiene product. It’s a small, flexible bell-shaped cup made of rubber or silicone that a woman inserts into her vagina to catch and collect menstrual fluid. It can be used for up to 12 hours, after which it is removed to dispose of the fluid and cleaned. The cup is rinsed with hot water and soap between each insertion and sterilized in boiling water at least once per period. A cup can last up to 10 years . Although menstrual cups have been around for decades, they historically have been less popular than pads or ta
Read more

Human bodies respond to infections differently depending on the time of day

Image
When microorganisms – such as bacteria or viruses – infect us, our immune system jumps into action. It’s highly trained to sense and eliminate infections and clear up any damage caused by them. It’s typically assumed our immune systems work the exact same way regardless of whether an infection occurs during the day or at night. But research spanning over half a century now shows our bodies actually respond differently at day and night. The reason for this is our body clock, and the fact that each cell in the body, including our immune cells, can tell what time of day it is. Our body clock has evolved over millions of years to help us survive. Every cell in the body has a collection of proteins that indicate the time depending on their levels. Knowing whether it’s day or night means our body can adjust its functions and behaviours (such as when we want to eat) to the correct time. Our body clock does this by generating 24 hour rhythms (also termed circadian rhythms ) in how cells f
Read more