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Infrared Telescope Lifts Off

Posted by Hemos on from the up-up-up-and-away dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On its Delta 2 Heavy-Lift vehicle, the Space Infrared Telescope (SIRTF) successfully launched to its solar orbit at 1:35 AM (EDT). As a result of the expansion of the Universe, most of the optical and ultraviolet radiation emitted from stars, galaxies, and quasars since the beginning of time now lies in the infrared. How and when the first objects in the Universe formed will be learned in large part from this observatory's infrared observations."

4 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Ball Aerospace Link by evilninja · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at Ball Aerospace... I thought some of you might like to see the BATC stuff.

  2. 60 years by solarlux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    God, I hope they calculate the trajectories right or there might be an interesting "meteor" shower in about 60 years...

    CNN Article

    Unlike most astronomical spacecraft SIRTF will not be orbiting the Earth. Instead, it will be put into orbit around the sun. "SIRTF will be following the Earth around the sun, kind of like a faithful puppy dog," astronomer Michael Werner said. The solar orbit increases the lifetime of the spacecraft. SIRTF will gradually lag further and further away from the Earth until it's too far to be detected. But in about six decades the Earth will "catch up" with SIRTF, like a race car lapping another race car.
  3. Some other projects along the same lines.... by supermojoman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are some links to other projects that have similar goals - examining expansion of the universe, faraway objects, etc. They also have sophisticated infrared imaging capabilities. The James Webb Space Telescope (formerly Next Generation Space Telescope) is the successor to Hubble, and Supernova/Acceleration Probe which, from what I remember, locates potential supernovae by examining data taken at fixed ground locations then points an orbiting camera at the calculated location to collect radiation data. Really interesting stuff!

  4. Technology by ZenArchitect · · Score: 5, Informative
    As a member of the team that is building the ground system for the science center that will be the primary interface between the public and the telescope I'm happy to say that code is all Java based. We have managed to combine the best that the open source community has available with a couple of commercial products to be a very productive development team. Here is a sample of what we are developing:
    • "Thick" Java Client for proposals, planning and data retieval - yes folks, Java on the desktop does work
    • Estimating and visibility servers - many computing drone managed by a J2EE server
    • Web services access to all of the public data produced by SIRTF - Perl, .NET, C++ is doesn't matter you can all get the data
    Oh, I forgot the mention.... there is not a single Windows box in the operations system. It's all Unix based because... well you know why don't you?