NASA Prepares The SIRTF For Launch

Anonymous Coward writes "NASA is ready to button up the SIRTF (Space Infrared Telescope Facility) probe for launch. The panorama is of the clean room at Hangar AE on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as the SIRTF team makes final adjustments."

Comments

I work for SIRTF. . .

[astrobabe]

Our Launch date is currently April 18th at something like 4:30 EDT. It was April 15th at the same time but a military satellite took higher precedence over us and was launched last Friday.

Our nominal launch window is April 15th through about May 9th. The next things to get launched are the Mars probes. We're supposed to be the "test" case of the Delta II Heavy for the Mars probes but it'll be a little too late to change things for them if we have rocket problems.

Our webpage is http://sirtf.caltech.edu for the general public and http://sirtf.caltech.edu/SSC for the scientists.

We're pretty small- 80 cm in diameter. We can essentially fit the whole space craft assembly in the telescope tube for Hubble. We have three instruments- 2 cameras and a spectrograph. IRAC is the InfraRed Array Camera and observes at 3.6,4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns. The other imager, MIPS, the Mid Infrared Photometer for SIRTF observes at 24, 50 and 160 microns. It can also do "rough" spectroscopy in Spectral Energy Distribution Mode but we don't anticipate making that available until about the 2nd year. The Spectrograph is named IRS (InfraRed Spectrograph) and observes from 5 to 40 microns. Our required mission life time is about 2.5 years but we anticipate that we will be operating for over 5 years (it is directly dependent on how much cryogen we have). After we run out of cryogen we can still operate IRAC but MIPS and IRS will have problems because of the warmth of the telescope. Oh and one last detail- we're in an earth trailing orbit so unlike Hubble we can't send people up to fix things or install new instruments.

Why they're ugly

[OmniGeek]

I guess there's no point making it aesthetic (i.e. with smooth panels and such) given the conditions of launch (cost per pound) and the fact that once it's up, nobody is going to see it ever again...

Aside from a total lack of aesthetic sensibility on all space instruments except ours, the outsides get all fiddly primarily for reasons of thermal control. Space environment is cold, mainly 'cause all your heat radiates away and there's nothing but the Sun to radiate back at you. Every external surface except instrument aperatures and antennas gets covered with thermal blankets (several layers of metallized plastic with plastic mesh spacers between) to reduce heat loss, or sometimes with mirrors (!) to radiate heat where one needs to lose it. It's a strange business...