NASA's Spitzer Begins Warm Mission

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Spitzer Space Telescope Mission Status May 15, 2009

NASA's Spitzer Begins Warm Mission

PASADENA, Calif. -- After more than five-and-a-half years of probing the cool cosmos, NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope has run out of the coolant that kept its infrared instruments chilled. The
telescope will warm up slightly, yet two of its infrared detector arrays will still operate successfully.
The new, warm mission will continue to unveil the far, cold and dusty universe.

Spitzer entered standby mode at 3:11 p.m. Pacific Time (6:11 p.m. Eastern Time or 22:11 Universal Time),
May 15, as result of running out of its liquid helium coolant. Scientists and engineers will spend the
next few weeks recalibrating the instrument at the warmer temperature, and preparing it to begin
science operations.

Additional information, including the following items, is at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-warm.html .
--A full news release about Spitzer's warm mission and past accomplishments
--A mock interview titled "If Spitzer Could Talk: An Interview with NASA's Coolest Space
Mission"
--A video about the Spitzer mission
--An article about the late astronomer Lyman Spitzer, the mission's namesake

Detailed information about the Spitzer mission at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Who's Who of the Spitzer mission:
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer
Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space
Systems in Denver, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo., support mission
and science operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's
infrared array camera; the instrument's principal investigator was Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
built Spitzer's infrared spectrograph; its principal investigator was Jim Houck of Cornell University
in Ithaca, N.Y. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and the University of Arizona in Tucson,
built the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer; its principal investigator was George Rieke of
the University of Arizona.

#2009-086

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