NASA officially decommissioned the Spitzer Space Telescope yesterday, bringing an end to a genuinely magnificent sixteen-year mission.



As one of NASA's original Great Observatories alongside Hubble, Chandra, and Compton, Spitzer was our premier window into the infrared universe. Because it was incredibly cooled, it could peer through dense clouds of interstellar dust to see stellar nurseries, dying stars, and the faint thermal glow of distant exoplanets. It played a pivotal role in confirming the seven Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. It has been drifting further behind Earth in its solar orbit for years, making communication increasingly difficult, but it leaves behind an incredibly rich archive of infrared data.