The HIFI instrument is back online

Jan 20, 2010 13:45 GMT  ·  By

Following repairs on its HIFI instrument, the Herschel Space Observatory is back online and ready to perform science. The European Space Agency (ESA) telescope is the largest ever built to date, and also the most sensitive. It surveys the skies from its “strategic” location in the L2 Lagrangian point, some 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, and mission controllers have recently announced that the spacecraft is currently being prepared to investigate the Orion Nebula, one of the most famous structures in the known Universe.

One of the primary targets Herschel has is to investigate and determine the structure of stellar nurseries in our galaxy, areas of intense stellar formation that may hold clues as to how the Milky Way evolved over billions of years. Thanks to its amazing observational power, the telescope can peer deeper and in more detail into the heart of structures that have eluded investigations until now. The observatory functions in infrared wavelengths, which allow it to peer through the massive clouds of cosmic dust and gas that regularly envelop stellar nurseries. It can therefore observe even protostars, the earliest stage of a full-blown star, even behind its dusty cloak.

The fact that HIFI was repaired is also good news because one of the main capabilities of the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared is that it can analyze the role that water plays in the formation of stars and planets, as well as in the evolution process of galaxies, Space Fellowship reports. “It is great to have HIFI back, Herschel is complete once more,” Herschel Project Scientist Goran Pilbratt adds. “Thanks to rescheduling of targets, virtually no science data will be lost,” the ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood, explains.

The instrument broke down around August 3, 2009, despite the fact that previous tests had shown that it performed beyond specifications. HIFI is actually a spectrometer that can function in two different sets of wavelengths – 157 to 212 and 240 to 625 micrometers, and is also one of the three scientific instruments aboard Herschel. It was built by a Dutch-led consortium, which also included the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. Dr. Frank Helmich, an expert at the SRON, says for the BBC News that, “We've had 30 people working on this. I don't watch much television, but I know Crime Scene Investigation and this was just such an investigation – but in space! We found out what happened and then we designed all the mitigating measures.”