The Spitzer Space Telescope: NASA’s Infrared Great Observatory – From the Youngest Galaxies to Exoplanets
Professor Tom Soifer
Director of the Spitzer Science Center
Former Chair of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy Division (PMA), Caltech
The Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth of NASA’s Great Observatories, was launched on August 25, 2003 for a nominal 5-year mission to study the Universe at infrared wavelengths. The observatory continues to operate and will do so until approximately March 2019. Spitzer has made and continues to make important discoveries on topics as varied as Near Earth Objects, Extrasolar Planets, star formation in galaxies throughout the universe and the most distant galaxies known in the universe. In this talk Prof. Soifer will describe the innovative design of Spitzer and focus on a small fraction of the major scientific accomplishments from the mission.
The room arrangements were a little different than usual. We took advantage of a beautiful day and had lunch outside on the deck, surrounded by boats and under the shade of a covering
Then we came inside for the talk.
Prof. Soifer’s presentation can be downloaded by clicking on this link:
To view the Trappist-1 video that Prof. Soifer showed at the meeting and access the Spitzer Telescope website, click on the following link:
Trappist-1 Video and Spitzer Telescope Website
For those of you who enjoyed the Lyncean coin presentation, here is a link to those slides:
Finally, for those who enjoyed the marble and magnets video before the talk, here is a link to that (it does make you smile!):
