What type of light waves are detected by the Spitzer telescope?

What type of light waves are detected by the Spitzer telescope?

During its “cold” or cryogenic mission (which ran from 2003 to 2009), Spitzer observed infrared wavelengths from 3 to 160 microns. During its subsequent “warm” mission (2009 to 2020), Spitzer observed in 3.6 and 4.5 microns. (Spitzer is the most sensitive IR telescope in history in these wavelengths.)

What wavelength does Spitzer use?

Spitzer Space Telescope

What did the Spitzer telescope discover?

Considered a cousin of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope was designed to study the early universe in infrared light. The first telescope to see light from a planet outside our solar system, Spitzer also made important discoveries about comets, stars, exoplanets and distant galaxies.

What part of the electromagnetic spectrum does Spitzer observe?

-infrared
The Spitzer Space Telescope’s three science instruments operate in the mid- to far-infrared between 3 and 160 microns.

How far can the Spitzer Space Telescope see?

Originally, Spitzer’s camera designers had hoped the spacecraft would detect galaxies about 12 billion light-years away. In fact, Spitzer has surpassed that, and can see even farther back in time – almost to the beginning of the universe.

How did the Spitzer telescope get its name?

It was named in honour of Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an American astrophysicist who in a seminal 1946 paper foresaw the power of astronomical telescopes operating in space. Workers at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, inspecting the Spitzer Space Telescope on May 2, 2003.

How does the Spitzer work?

1. A basic external view of Spitzer in its Earth-trailing solar orbit. The telescope cools by radiating to space and by the change in enthalpy of evaporating liquid helium while hiding from the Sun behind its solar panel and flying away from the thermal emission of the Earth. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

What is true of a blackbody?

A blackbody allows all incident radiation to pass into it (no reflected energy) and internally absorbs all the incident radiation (no energy transmitted through the body). This is true for radiation of all wavelengths and for all angles of incidence. Hence the blackbody is a perfect absorber for all incident radiation.

What kind of telescope is the Spitzer Space Telescope?

An artist’s concept of the Spitzer Space Telescope. What is Spitzer Space Telescope? NASA’s Spitzer was the first telescope to detect light from an exoplanet, or a planet outside our solar system. Spitzer uses an ultra-sensitive infrared telescope to study asteroids, comets, planets and distant galaxies.

What was the name of the NASA Space Telescope?

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility or SIRTF) was the fourth and last of NASA’s “Great Observatories,” after the Hubble Space Telescope (launched in 1990), the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (1999).

How did Spitzer discover the planets in Trappist 1?

Using what’s called the “transit method,” Spitzer can stare at a star and detect periodic dips in brightness that happen when a planet crosses a star’s face. In one of its most remarkable achievements, Spitzer discovered three of the TRAPPIST-1 planets and confirmed that the system has seven Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star.

When did the Spitzer Space Telescope run out of coolant?

The mission was operated and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Spitzer Science Center, located on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California. Spitzer ran out of liquid helium coolant on 15 May 2009, which stopped far-IR observations.