🛰️ Mission
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
- Launched
- 25 August 2003, 23 years ago
- Worked for
- 16 years, until 30 January 2020
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- Infrared light
- Where it is
- Drifted round the Sun behind Earth, falling further behind every year
- Best known for
- Saw newborn stars inside their dust clouds, and found seven Earth-sized planets around TRAPPIST-1
Did you know?
- It carried 360 litres of liquid helium to stay cold. When that ran out in 2009 it kept working on two of its instruments for another eleven years.
- By the end it was so far behind Earth that its signals took minutes to arrive.
What it showed us
Tarantula Nebula
A huge star nursery with spidery arms, in a galaxy next to ours.
Omega Centauri
The biggest and brightest globular cluster in the sky, with about 10 million stars.
The Pleiades
The Seven Sisters: a family of young stars you can see without a telescope.
More NASA photos of Spitzer Space TelescopeStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.