After over 16 years of making continuous observations, the Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA has come to the end of its tenure this Thursday and it has left behind great legacy of discovery in its trail and that has created a lot of new questions and given many targets for a lot of the observations to follow up.
NASA has described Spitzer as their infrared detective which had been spying on the exoplanets and a lot of the galaxies which are far and away. There is a gap in the infrared observations till the telescope which is known as the James Webb Space Telescope sees its launch by NASA in the year 2021. It is a large infrared telescope and is going to be the premier observatory in the next 10 years as per NASA.
The telescope has been named after James Webb who was the former administrator for NASA and had been running the agency in the time of the Space Race from the year 1961 till the year 1968. NASA has said that while the scientist has been linked to the major program known as the Apollo Program, he had also supported the space flight as well as science for the organization.
However the scientists are not too bothered about the gap. The Exoplanet science is going to be continuing through the TESS mission of NASA for planet hunting that has already discovered more than 1,000 candidates in its first year of operations as per the agency.
Spitzer was instrumental in helping the scientists lay down a groundwork for the determination of what the exoplanets had been looking like and had helped them in learning how the telescopes are operated in the previous 16 years.
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