History of the Spitzer Mission

Details History of the Spitzer Mission History of the Spitzer Mission

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.2301r&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #23.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The Spitzer Telescope was launched more than 20 years after the original announcement of opportunity was released. During this long gestation period, the mission took a wide variety of forms and had to survive many political and managerial environments within NASA and in the US Government generally. Finally, approval to build the telescope was won at the height of the faster-better-cheaper era, but completing it extended beyond this phase. This poster shows the key steps in preserving the mission and why decision makers viewed it positively at critical points when it might have been killed. In the end, the scope of the mission was reduced by a factor of about five while still preserving much of its science capabilities. This reduction required a new way to streamline the science objectives by adopting a limited number of key programs and requiring that all features be justified in terms of those programs. This philosophy provided decision rules to carry out necessary descopes while preserving a coherent set of capabilities. In addition, the faster-better-cheaper guidelines requires use of a small launch vehicle, which was only possible by the invention of a new “warm launch” telescope concept, in which the telescope would cool primarily by radiation into space after launch. Both of these concepts are critical to the approach to future missions such as JWST.
This work is partially supported by contract 1255094 from JPL/Caltech to the University of Arizona.

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