Spitzer Telescope Receives Aerospace Community Award

The award, established in 1961 by the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, received the Spitzer telescope for continuing work on the study in infrared light of the hidden space. On behalf of the team, the 2014 AIAA Space Science Award was honored by Michael Werner, who is Spitzer’s project supervisor. It was presented on the seventh of August at a forum held in San Diego.

The award was awarded for outstanding achievements: five thousand scientific works, seventy-five thousand hours of observations and fateful discoveries, including the detected light of extrasolar planets.



The telescope “started work” in 2003, and to this day it is better to study the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system (exoplanets). Two years after its launch, the telescope made its first discovery, measuring direct light from a distant world.

Seven years ago, the telescope ran out of refrigerant and since then it has been in the “thermal” phase, without stopping, however, collecting data on the light of exoplanets and conducting their analysis. In addition, its infrared heat-sensitive “vision” is used to study objects located both in our solar system and those that are separated from the Earth by billions of light years.



The study of distant galaxies and exoplanets orbiting stars at a small distance from our planet, as well as small objects in our solar system, will continue in the coming years of the mission. This will be the mission of the James Webb Space Telescope.



Source: planetologia.ru/