BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Spitzer Space Telesceope's 12th birthday

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was launched almost exactly 12 years ago - on August 25, 2003. It's not as well known as the Hubble Space Telescope, but it has also been taking superb images. Spitzer doesn't take pictures in the visual range, but is ultra sensitive to the infra-red. This means that it's able to image things that Hubble can't see.

To celebrate its dozen years in space, JPL-Caltech has put together a digital calendar. It covers 12 months from September, each month noting some of the mission's notable discoveries with a picture of one of them.

You can see all the images here and they are gorgeous.

And here is a link to the digital calendar .

Most everybody knows about New Horizons after its spectacular fly-by of Pluto last month. The data from that will still be coming home over a year from now.

But NASA is augmenting the New Horizons data with the use of its other space telescopes and that includes Spitzer. On July 23 it began a seven-day series of observations. Since its sensitivity is in the infrared, it gathered infrared data at 18 different longitudes. Even though the telescope is about three billion miles from the dwarf planet, it could still show possible changes on Pluto's icy surface.

Here is a lovely set of Spitzer images that you can download for wallpaper. The Jet Propulsion Lab has made them available - have a look. I've put the Pinwheel Galaxy on my desktop.