NASA publishes stunning images of the Doomed Spitzer telescope

If you think of space telescopes, Hubble is probably the first thing that comes to your mind, but NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is also worthy of attention. This instrument was launched in 2003 with an estimated life of 2.5 years and is still operational. NASA is about to complete Spitzer's mission, but the agency has not finished showing what the spacecraft can do. NASA has just released images of a dense star cluster captured by the aging telescope.

Spitzer is an infrared telescope, so it allows to see the features of distant objects not visible in the spectrum seen by human eyes. The telescope is equipped with three instruments: the infrared infrared camera (IRAC), the infrared spectrograph (IRS) and the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer (MIPS). In order to reduce ambient heat interference, Spitzer used liquid helium to cool its infrared instruments. Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009, which was already well beyond its original mission. At this point, he could no longer use the MIPS and IRAC systems to scan the high infrared wavelengths.

The recently published photos represent the regions of Cepheus C and Cepheus B. There are two images of these regions as they come from both epochs of the Spitzer Space Telescope. The above green-toned image combines the data from the IRAC and MIPS Spitzer instruments before the coolant is dry in 2009. After that, the MIPS did not work anymore – IRAC is the only Spitzer instrument that always works as expected because it does not need coolant. The image below in red comes only from the RAIC.

Cepheus C and Cepheus B regions via RAIC only.

The larger wavelength range of "mosaic" from older data shows more detail, but both are still more complex than an instrument like Hubble that can not look deep into the infrared. On the left side of the images you can see Cepheus C, composed of many young stars. Many of them are masked by dust in the image only IRAC, but the mosaic shows more. The young nebula on the right also shows more details in the mosaic. Above is the Cepheus B cluster. These stars are a little older than Cepheus C. The nebula also houses other fascinating objects, such as a fleeing star that cuts dust and gas (centrally right), and V374 Ceph is a larger, older star with a thick disk of dust. visible edge in the images.

NASA plans to remove the Spitzer Space Telescope in January 2020, which is a shame. Even with a single instrument in operation, it still has some value. However, the agency was not able to find a private organization to support the telescope.

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