Another dust ring around Saturn and new planets outside our solar system: “Spitzer” was instrumental in many spectacular discoveries. On Thursday, the decrepit space telescope will be finally switched off after almost 17 years in space.
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The mission was originally scheduled to run for 2.5 years. But “Spitzer” worked much longer than planned.
The telescope, named after the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, started on August 25, 2003 from the Cape Canaveral spaceport. It was supposed to follow the earth on its way around the sun, but fell back over time. The space telescope is currently about 254 million kilometers behind the earth. In order to transmit data, however, it always has to turn to earth. During this time, the solar cells of the telescope were not facing the sun, which caused problems with the solar-powered batteries. The helium that cooled the telescope’s instruments has also long since run out.
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Thousands of scientists have observed “Spitzer” for well over 100,000 hours, and the data from it has been used in more than 8,600 scientific articles, as well as in numerous doctoral theses and books. The most important discoveries of the space telescope include gigantic dust ring around Saturn and several exoplanets.
The data collected by the telescope is archived and is still accessible to researchers. The mission is to be celebrated again at a scientific conference in mid-February in California.
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