NASA Prepares The SIRTF For Launch 14
Anonymous Coward writes "NASA is ready to button up the SIRTF (Space Infrared Telescope Facility) probe for launch. The panorama is of the clean room at Hangar AE on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as the SIRTF team makes final adjustments."
Details (Score:2)
Nice panorama app ... one question: (Score:1)
Seems sort of odd to me... but maybe they're re-using some codebase for which an overhead geo map was appropriate - say, for an outside panorama shot?
I have to say, that looks like one nice piece of hardware, though its hard to get a feeling for its construction from far back. One thing I've always been impressed with is just how much junk there always appears to be on the outside of satelli
Re:Nice panorama app ... one question: (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.astrobio.net/news/media.php
NASA is the only government agency with their own TV station
Why they're ugly (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside from a total lack of aesthetic sensibility on all space instruments except ours, the outsides get all fiddly primarily for reasons of thermal control. Space environment is cold, mainly 'cause all your heat radiates away and there's nothing but the Sun to radiate back at you. Every external surface excep
Re:Why they're ugly (Score:1)
By 'ours', do you mean a particular company, or some nation?
I always thought the early Russian satellites and whatnot were particularly interesting-looking. Some of them are just downright funky, but that could just be because my 'fashion' sense has been honed so far from any CCCP-era style sensibilities that I only think its cool because
Still. My sat's gonna look bitchin'. Whenever I get aro
I work for SIRTF. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Our nominal launch window is April 15th through about May 9th. The next things to get launched are the Mars probes. We're supposed to be the "test" case of the Delta II Heavy for the Mars probes but it'll be a little too late to change things for them if we have rocket problems.
Our webpage is http://sirtf.caltech.edu for the general public and http://sirtf.caltech.edu/SSC for the scientists.
We're pretty small- 80 cm in diameter. We can essentially fit the whole space craft assembly in the telescope tube for Hubble. We have three instruments- 2 cameras and a spectrograph. IRAC is the InfraRed Array Camera and observes at 3.6,4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns. The other imager, MIPS, the Mid Infrared Photometer for SIRTF observes at 24, 50 and 160 microns. It can also do "rough" spectroscopy in Spectral Energy Distribution Mode but we don't anticipate making that available until about the 2nd year. The Spectrograph is named IRS (InfraRed Spectrograph) and observes from 5 to 40 microns. Our required mission life time is about 2.5 years but we anticipate that we will be operating for over 5 years (it is directly dependent on how much cryogen we have). After we run out of cryogen we can still operate IRAC but MIPS and IRS will have problems because of the warmth of the telescope. Oh and one last detail- we're in an earth trailing orbit so unlike Hubble we can't send people up to fix things or install new instruments.
SIRTF (Score:2)
Hmmm... (Score:1)
It looks like they're off to a great start.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1)
Update your JRE [sun.com]
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1)
To what, exactly? I get the same error. My console says:
Java(TM) Plug-in: Version 1.4.1_02
Using JRE version 1.4.1_02 Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1)
Java(TM) Plug-in: Version 1.4.1_02
Using JRE version 1.4.1_02 Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM
Interesting, I have 1.4.1_01. Maybe you should downgrade then
Less than impressed... (Score:1)
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