Spitzer Celebrates 10 Years in Space

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NASA's Spitzer Telescope Celebrates 10 Years in Space

PASADENA, Calif. -- Ten years after a Delta II rocket launched NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, lighting up the night sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., the fourth of the agency's four Great Observatories continues to illuminate the dark side of the cosmos with its infrared eyes.

The telescope studied comets and asteroids, counted stars, scrutinized planets and galaxies, and discovered soccer-ball-shaped carbon spheres in space called buckyballs. Moving into its second decade of scientific scouting from an Earth-trailing orbit, Spitzer continues to explore the cosmos near and far. One additional task is helping NASA observe potential candidates for a developing mission to capture, redirect and explore a near-Earth asteroid

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Didn't follow this one's launch. Great that it'll be used to detect asteroids.

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Spitzer Space Telescope: 10 Years of Innovation

Ten years after launch, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope continues to illuminate the dark side of the cosmos with its infrared eyes.

Credit: NASA

Source: NASA - Multimedia