Rhea Space Activity has come up with a plan to bring the Spitzer Space Telescope back online. In this respect informs Ars Tech.
The Spitzer space observatory was launched in 2003 and is considered one of the “Big Four Observatories” along with Hubble. It works in infrared and requires a heatsink because the telescope’s functionality has been limited since it expired in 2009. Despite this, the observatory continued to be useful, but gradually its unique orbit began to get confused: It revolves around the Sun, but not too far from Earth and is slowly moving away from it. Over time, the orbit changed so that it was necessary to rotate the body of the device to direct the antenna to Earth, and in this position the Sun dimly illuminated the solar panels. For this reason, the work of the observatory was suspended indefinitely in 2020.
Now Rhea Space Activity has received a $250,000 grant from the US Space Force for research work to build a robotic space telescope rescue mission. It is currently twice the distance from the Earth as between the Earth and the Sun, that is, on the other side of the Sun.
“This will be the most ambitious thing ever in spacecraft maintenance. Astrophysicist and company founder Sean Usman is literally sending a satellite to the other side of the Sun to resurrect the last ‘Great Observatory’.
Spitzer Resurrector will be a small spacecraft no larger than one cubic meter and is expected to launch in 2026. It will then take three years for the spacecraft to reach the telescope and observe solar flares along the way. Once the rescue vehicle reaches a distance of 50-100 kilometers from the telescope, it will attempt to make contact with it, and if successful, it will operate as a repeater satellite during observations.
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