14 DAY TRIAL // NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope launched over a decade ago, on August 25, 2003, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its mission: probe the cosmos and document asteroids, comets, alien planets, even distant stars and galaxies.
Mind you, the telescope has done so much more than pin point foreign planets light-years away from our home in space. It's even helped scientists study this distant world's climate and composition.
Then, it's pointed its instruments at our own cosmic neighborhood and helped probe Saturn's biggest and outermost ring, which astronomers say is 7,000 times greater than the planet itself and 300 times the diameter of the Sun.
To celebrate the telescope's 12th anniversary, NASA put together a new digital calendar that includes images of dying stars and faraway galaxies and that follows Spitzer's working agenda since it was launched in 2003 until present day.
The images, included in the gallery below, highlight the Spitzer Space Telescope's best discoveries over the years. Not that other telescopes haven't done an equally great job studying the cosmos, but these views really are positively jaw-dropping.
“You can't fully represent Spitzer's scientific bounty in only 12 images, but these gems demonstrate Spitzer's unique perspectives on both the nearest, and the most distant, objects in the universe,” said Michael Werner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The Spitzer Space Telescope is a-ok and nowhere near retirement, so we can expect many more such stunning views in the years to come.
