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ARIZONA TEAM HEADS FOR CAPE CANAVERAL
FOR APRIL 18 LAUNCH OF SPACE INFRARED TELESCOPE FACILITY

From Lori Stiles, UA News Services, 520-621-1877
April 10, 2003

Part 1 of 2

***EDITORS AND NEWS DIRECTORS: The entire UA Steward Observatory MIPS
team will leave Tucson for Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, April 16.
They will be staying at Hampton Inn, 3425 North Atlantic Ave., Cocoa
Beach, Fla. phone 321-799-4099. They plan a pre-launch dinner for
more than 50 that will include all original MIPS team members, as
well as current team members. Launch day is Friday, April 18. VIDEO:
NASA animation of SIRTF launch and science operation is available
from UA News Services, contact Vern Lamplot, 520-621-1877.***


Astronomers looking at the very cold, far-infrared universe have
barely glimpsed what's there.

They've had to make do with imaging systems that survey the cosmos a
few pixel points of light at a time. And they've had to grab
opportunities to observe from space or high in the atmosphere, where
the cosmic far infrared photons are visible.

Things will change dramatically with the launch of the Space Infrared
Telescope Facility (SIRTF) on Friday, April 18.

SIRTF will fly three science instruments in orbit around the sun for
a minimum two-and-one-half year mission. It is the last of NASA's
Great Observatories, which also include the Hubble Space Telescope,
the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

One of the SIRTF instruments, from the University of Arizona, will
use the first true imaging arrays at far-infrared wavelengths. It
will detect far-infrared objects 100 times fainter than have ever
been seen before. Where pioneering far-infrared surveys of the
1980s - 1990s saw nearly empty sky, SIRTF will get views packed with
infrared-bright objects, said University of Arizona astronomer George
H. Rieke. 

Rieke is principal investigator for the Multiband Imaging Photometer
(MIPS). The MIPS is a highly sensitive camera that will take images
of the coolest objects in space, objects at temperatures between
about minus 430 and minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

------------------------------------------
Contact Information
George H. Rieke
520-621-2832  grieke{at}as.arizona.edu

Erick T. Young
520-621-4119  eyoung{at}as.arizona.edu
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Related Links
MIPS - http://mips.as.arizona.edu
SIRTF - http://sirtf.jpl.nasa.gov
-------------------------------------------

Rieke and his UA Steward Observatory team delivered their instrument
to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colo., for testing, and then to NASA in
March 2000. MIPS was mounted in a helium dewar (a kind of
sophisticated thermos bottle), cooled to 1.5 degrees Kelvin, (or
minus 457 Fahrenheit, just above absolute zero) with the telescope,
and again tested. From there it went to Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale,
Calif., where it was installed in the spacecraft and further tested.

The full SIRTF observatory is being readied for launch at the NASA
Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The SIRTF mission is
managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and Cornell
University have developed the other two SIRTF science instruments.
CfA has developed the Infrared Array Camera and Cornell University
has developed the Infrared Spectograph.

Rieke's group began work on their camera in 1984, when SIRTF was
envisioned as a $2 billion mission. The SIRTF design was overhauled
in 1994 to cut mission costs to under a half billion dollars. The UA
team contracted to build MIPS for $23.7 million. Advances in infrared
detectors allowed SIRTF to retain much of its power despite the huge
budget cut. 

UA astronomer Erick T. Young, deputy principal investigator for MIPS,
led the Steward Observatory team that designed and built the first
far-infrared detector arrays for their part of the SIRTF mission. The
arrays will enable MIPS to see far-infrared objects never seen
before.

"Such images will show us infrared-bright galaxies to the edge of the
known Universe, providing an entirely new perspective on how galaxies
and massive black holes formed," Rieke said.

"And we can look around nearby sun-like stars for planetary debris
systems with emissions as wimpy as our own solar system emission.

"In fact, we've shown that MIPS, looking back from any close star,
could detect the finely divided material we expect lies out in the
Kuiper Belt," he added. The Kuiper Belt is the system of small, faint
and very cold objects recently found beyond the orbits of Neptune and
Pluto. 

But the real breakthroughs are up to the astronomical community,
which will get 80 percent of SIRTF observing time, Rieke emphasized.
The SIRTF Science Center at the California Institute of Technology
administers observing proposals.

"With such an advance in capability, we expect that discoveries will
be made well beyond our currently imagined ones," Rieke said.

Tucson-based members of the MIPS science team since 1984 also include
Regents' Professor emeritus Frank J. Low, astronomy Professor Marcia
Rieke, UA Steward Observatory Director and Regents' Professor Peter
A. Strittmatter, and Jeremy Mould, director of the National Optical
Astronomy Observatory.

Mould has a particular interest in what MIPS' improved sensitivity
will reveal about the early formation of galaxies, and the role of
galaxy mergers in this process, from about 500 million years after
the Big Bang to six billion years later.

"Galaxies tend to have strong infrared signatures when they formed
from mergers because of the burst of star formation and dust
production that naturally follows such a merger," Mould explained.

Mould's recent paper on this subject, "A Model for SIRTF Galaxy
Counts" will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on
April 20. The MIPS Surveys Team will test predictions in the paper.
For more, see http://lully.as.arizona.edu/GTODeep/Public/

THE MULTIBAND IMAGING PHOTOMETER - The UA camera on SIRTF contains
three super-cooled detector systems that operate at different
wavelengths. One array, supplied by Boeing North America, operates at
24 microns, 50 times the wavelength of visible light. (A micron is
one-thousandth of a millimeter.)

Another far-infrared array, built at Steward Observatory, is
sensitive to radiation at 70 microns. It contains 1,024 detectors,
100 times larger than previous arrays operating in space at this
wavelength. Each detector has about 30 times the sensitivity of those
in the earlier arrays. 

 - Continued -

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