spacetoday.net: NASA releases first images from, new name for, SIRTF

Posted: Fri, Dec 19, 2003, 11:37 AM ET (1637 GMT)
M81 galaxy seen by Spitzer (NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Willner)

NASA on Thursday released the first images taken by its new Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), as well as announcing the telescope's new name. The spacecraft, now known as the Spitzer Space Telescope, was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit in August but needed a few months for the spacecraft to cool down and its instruments to complete calibration before the first images could be taken. The images released Thursday feature a galaxy, an emission nebula, a protoplanetary disk surrounding the star Formalhaut, and a young star and distant galaxy that both show evidence of water and organic molecules. The spacecraft, the last in NASA’s Great Observatories program that includes the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, is named after the late Lyman Spitzer, a Princeton University astronomer who was the first to propose developing a space telescope.