Spitzer Shares The Wealth

SPACE SCOPES

Sometimes, the best way to understand how something works is to take it apart. The same is true for galaxies like NGC 300, which NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has divided into its various parts. NGC 300 is a face-on spiral galaxy located 7.5 million light-years away in the southern constellation Sculptor. This false-color image taken by the infrared array camera on Spitzer readily distinguishes the main star component of the galaxy (blue) from its dusty spiral arms (red). The star distribution peaks strongly in the central bulge where older stars congregate, and tapers off along the arms where younger stars reside.

Thanks to Spitzer's unique ability to sense the heat or infrared emission from dust, astronomers can now clearly trace the embedded dust structures within NGC 300's arms. When viewed at visible wavelengths, the galaxy's dust appears as dark lanes, largely overwhelmed by bright starlight. With Spitzer, the dust -- in particular organic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- can be seen in vivid detail (red). These organic molecules are produced, along with heavy elements, by the stellar nurseries that pepper the arms. The findings provide a better understanding of spiral galaxy mechanics and, in the future, will help decipher more distant galaxies, whose individual components cannot be resolved. This image was taken on Nov. 21, 2003 and is composed of photographs obtained at four wavelengths: 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange) and 8 microns (red).

Pasadena (JPL) May 12, 2004
Like a philanthropist donating a prized collection to a museum, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has opened a virtual vault rich with scientific data. The Spitzer Science Archive now provides astronomers access to the infrared telescope's data well before the mission's one-year anniversary in space.

For members of the science community, it's as easy as going to the Spitzer home page and using a browser interface to download the data. To mark the debut of the archive, NASA is releasing two new dazzling Spitzer images.

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) was launched on August 25, 2003. Its high-tech infrared eyes observe galaxies, infant stars and newly forming planetary systems that have escaped the view of other observatories.

"We are opening Spitzer's floodgates to the world," said Dr. Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, deputy manager of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Any astronomer with Internet access has this information at his or her fingertips." The Spitzer Science Center is responsible for validating and processing the scientific data into a standard form that astronomers all over the world can use to further their studies.

"People can do scientific research by comparing observations made at different wavelengths using data from just the archives," said Spitzer Project Scientist Dr. Michael Werner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The Spitzer archive will produce scientific surprises for decades long past the observatory's lifetime."

The archive includes data from the 110-hour "first-look" survey of the mid-infrared sky, and information from the Spitzer Legacy Science Program � a half dozen scientific investigations that can be used as the basis for future research.

Spitzer is the fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories; the others are the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. Spitzer views space in the infrared, Hubble in the ultraviolet and optical, Chandra in the x-ray bands of light, and Compton in gamma rays.

EARTH OBSERVATION

New Interpretation Of Satellite Data Supports Global Warming

Seattle (SPX) May 07, 2004
For years the debate about climate change has had a contentious sticking point � satellite measurements of temperatures in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere where most weather occurs, were inconsistent with fast-warming surface temperatures.

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