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Spitzer SpaceTelescope shutdown in a week

After sixteen years in orbit, NASA will shut down the Spitzer Space Telescope on January 22, 2020,

The telescope is still functional in a somewhat limited manner but NASA wishes to save the annual budget of $14 million to operate it. Moreover, it will become redundant and significantly superseded once the infrared James Webb Space Telescope launches and becomes operational next year.

NASA had hoped a private organization would take over Spitzer’s operation, but apparently got no takers.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • V-Man

    Call me naive, but why does it cost $14M/year to pay a few people to man a desk in Flight Control, monitor the thing and occasionally send up a snippet of code? Where is the money going?

  • V-Man: I tend to agree with you, but if the cost could have been cut a lot, then some private organization would have taken NASA up on its offer to take over operations, and gotten their money back by charging for telescope use.

    That no one did suggests the cost is real.

  • Edward

    The end of the article helps to explain the annual cost:

    JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Space operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at IPAC at Caltech.

    Lockheed Martin performs the space operations, and there is overhead associated with this (e.g. managers, payroll people, etc.). JPL manages the mission with its own overhead (e.g. managers, planners, payroll, etc.). Caltech seems to be the main science manager, again with overhead. The remaining costs will be associated with archiving the data and distributing it to future science studies, and those costs will move to a different budget line item, as will the cost of the future scientists. Add to this the cost of antenna time.

    We spent $720 million building her, with an intention of getting data for five years or so. The helium lasted for five and a half years of operations, so we spent, just for construction, more than $120 million per year of data collected on her primary mission. The past decade has been bonus operations for one tenth the cost of the original mission.

    Considering the science that we have been getting from Spitzer, $14 million per year is a reasonable cost to the taxpayer.

    Hopefully, future commercial science exploration will be designed, and managed in a way so that they can be done more efficiently and similar data will cost even less.

  • Jason Lewis

    $14 million? We spend over $11 billion a year now on climate.

  • Lee S

    I have always been fascinated by the costs of keeping a mission going once it is launched and in the right place…. Not rovers and such, but orbiters and probes…. Once launched, and requiring not much in the way of mission management, even given the cost of the DSN, I fail to see how the real cost, if it was broken down, could be multiple millions per year to “just” keep contact with the thing and down load recieved data, for someone else to analyze.
    Does anyone know how much it costs the keep the voyager missions running… I can’t imagine it needs more than a handful of technicians?
    ( I’m too lazy to Google, and I have pancakes to cook… My kids have requested “American pancakes”…. I have no idea what the difference is…. But they are getting English ones, and I will lie to them… ;-) )

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