NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope celebrates its 10th anniversary!

On August 25th, 2003, NASA launched their Spitzer Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun, and in the ten years since, it has wowed us with the incredible images it has captured of the universe around us.

Spitzer is an infrared telescope, so the pictures it takes, literally, show the universe in a very different light than what we're used to seeing. For example, peering out into space with just our eyes, we see the Milky Way as a dusty smudge across the night sky. However, looking at our galactic home in the infrared, Spitzer can pierce right through that dust veil to reveal objects we never knew were there!

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This short video gives a great demonstration of Spitzer's power:

Astronomers have put this ability to good use, observing asteroids and comets, imaging stars in the process of being born, seeing unprecedented details of nebulae and galaxies, and even spotting planets orbiting other stars (so-called extrasolar planets or 'exoplanets'), just to name a few. In 2005, Spitzer became the first telescope to capture light that was directly emitted from an extrasolar planet!

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Spitzer is part of NASA's Great Observatories program. These four space-based telescopes were a bit like a comic book superhero group, each with their own distinct abilities, but all four meshed together as a team to provide us with spectacular views of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope (1990-present) observes from the near-infrared, through the visible spectrum and into the near-ultraviolet, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991-2000) covered gamma rays, the Chandra X-ray Observatory (1999-present) watches for X-Ray emissions, and the Spitzer Space Telescope (2003-present) rounds things out by observing in the infrared. Of the four, Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer are still going, even long after their original mission time was complete, but we lost Compton in 2000.

(Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz)

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