Lockheed Martin Delivers NASA's Space Infrared Telescope Facility

Yahoo! Finance ^ | 3/7/03 | Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company

[gomaaa]

I have friends who worked on the one of detectors for this thing! Very cool stuff. Lots of potential for big discoveries.

[NormsRevenge]

A couple of shots at this link. Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF)

Pretty cool .. 8-\

[dts32041]

How are they launching, you mean they are going to use a rocket and not the shuttle.

Maybe they are learning something?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

NASA's Origins Program follows the chain of events that began with the birth of the Universe at the Big Bang. It seeks to understand the entire process of cosmic evolution from the formation of chemical elements, galaxies, stars and planets, through the mixing of chemicals and energy that cradles life on Earth, to the earliest self-replicating organisms and the profusion of life. In short, Origins hopes to answer the fundamental questions: Where did we come from? Are we alone?

They need to hurry:

'Phantom menace' may rip up cosmos

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Shuttle can only put objects in Earth orbit, needs to go out farther!

[Physicist]

There was a contest to name this telescope a couple of years back. Evidently they have yet to pick a winner.

The name I submitted was "Shapley" (after the astronomer Harlow Shapley).

[NormsRevenge]

Caltech SIRTF site

About SIRTF

JPL/NASA - Space Infrared Telescope Facility Arrives at KSC

[NormsRevenge]

[Ken522]

So like how is the satellite going to transmit its data to Earth when it is on the other side of the sun? The article said it'll be in a independent orbit around the sun behind the earth ... dazed and confused ...

[Physicist]

It will be at one of the Earth's Lagrange points.

[KevinDavis]

So we could probaly detect other planets with this telescope?

[KevinDavis]

Shuttle can only put objects in Earth orbit, needs to go out farther!

or we develop something better than the space shuttle that can go out farther than Earth.

[Rain-maker]

http://sirtf.caltech.edu/index.shtml   (click for larger images)            

[gomaaa]

That would be cool, but VERY expensive. We'll be lucky to get a revamped shuttle at this point. Most satellites are put in space by unmanned rockets anyway. They fail much more often than our manned flights do, but since noone dies, it's not as big of a deal.

I don't think they could detect planets in other solar systems with this. I think the article is referring to studies of planets and moons within our own solar system. The way they detect planets around other stars is extremely cool, though! There is so little light given off by these things that it's unlikely we'll be able to directly see many, so they have to infer these planets existence through other means.

If you have two stars, say with about the same mass, they will orbit not one or the other, but a common point in the middle, like a dumbbell being spun around. The Earth and the sun do the same thing, but the Sun is so much bigger that it's really not detectable and it looks just as though the Earth was orbiting the stationary Sun. The thing is that planets the size of Jupiter are so big that they actually force a little wobble in the Sun's position as they go around each other. We can detect this little wobble in other stars and have shown evidence of dozens of planets about the size of Jupiter that way. There is a professor where I work who is trying to prove the existence of planets around stars with large clouds of dust around them by looking at patterns in the dust. We'll see if she turns up anything!

[Brett66]

The Keck and ESO's VLT should be able to see larger exo-planets directly. Keck is almost ready to begin a search for exo-planets and the VLT should be ready in a year or two. Keck has already demonstrated adaptive optics and interferometry capabilities, but I don't think it has used both at the same time. It will need all of these methods to see an extra-solar Jupiter.

[KevinDavis]

I would prefer ways to find Earth like planets so we could go there...

[Brett66]

IIRC, I think the Keck and VLT telescopes can detect Earth-sized planets using the wobble method. So we could probably find terrestrial, Earth-sized planets in the "life zones" of various stars, but we wouldn't be able to directly see them. Now NASA is planning it's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission which will be able to get chemical spectographs of the atmosphere of exo-planets and it could concievably tell us whether life and/or civilization exist on exo-planets out to 40 light years. It will be able to directly image an Earth-like exo-planet, but it would only look like a dot of light. Also the ESA is wanting to launch the Darwin mission, which is a space based interferometer with six 1.5 meter telescopes. It will have greater resolution than the Terrestrial Planet Finder, they're planning to launch around 2014. That's a long time to wait, but it will be amazing to see the results start coming in. We could actually have an answer to whether life exists in other solar systems by 2020.

[NormsRevenge]

Space Telescope Sciences Institute

Chandra X-ray Observatory Center

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=planet+discovery+telescope

• First Detection Made of an Extrasolar Planet's Atmosphere

• Extrasolar Planet in Double Star System Discovered from La Silla

[NormsRevenge]

http://hubblesite.org/