BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy A great space telescope has gone blind

The Herschel Space Observatory - named for William and Caroline Herschel - finally went blind today. It is the largest telescope ever sent into space, an infrared observatory launched in 2009 by the European Space Agency. It has studied cool dusty regions, such as stellar nurseries, which visible light can't penetrate.

The helium coolant finally ran out so it's no longer able to sense in the infra-red and submillimeter. However Herschel has taken thousands of images which are still waiting for astronomers to analyze.

Here's a star-forming region in the Orion nebula.

The very first article I wrote for BellaOnline was What Herschel Found in a Dark Cloud. That was over three years ago. How time flies!

Nice image of the telescope, set against a gorgeous nebula background.

Herschel Space Telescope and one of its images

You could almost believe the old superstition about things happening in threes.
(1) The Herschel Space Observatory finished its mission when it ran out of coolant at the end of April.
(2) A few weeks later the Kepler mission lost a second gyro and can no longer point accurately enough to collect data. (It hasn't yet been officially written off, but it's still not working.)
(3) And now this week the French space agency CNES announced that it has had to retire its planet-hunter CoRoT. They couldn't restore the computer which failed last November. There will be a controlled de-orbit and the satellite will burn up on re-entry.

In case this sounds like a lot of failures, I should point out that all three missions have performed beyond the original expectation and have provided a vast amount of data which will take a few years to analyze.

Goodness.

That's Terrible !!!!