[14][15] He has been cited for his pioneering contributions to rocketry and astronomy, as well as "his vision and leadership in articulating the advantages and benefits to be realized from the Space Telescope Program.

Anticipating the major results from an upcoming Explorer satellite and from the Shuttle mission, the report also favored the "study and development of ... long-duration spaceflights of infrared telescopes cooled to cryogenic temperatures[18]."

Ground-based observatories have the drawback that at infrared wavelengths or frequencies, both the Earth's atmosphere and the telescope itself will radiate (glow) brightly.

SIRTF would be a 1-meter class, cryogenically cooled, multi-user facility consisting of a telescope and associated focal plane instruments.

However, the Spacelab-2 flight aboard STS-51-F showed that the Shuttle environment was poorly suited to an onboard infrared telescope due to contamination from the relatively "dirty" vacuum associated with the orbiters.

[citation needed] The primary instrument package (telescope and cryogenic chamber) was developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies, in Boulder, Colorado.

[22] The far-infrared detectors (70–160 micrometers) were developed jointly by the University of Arizona and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using gallium-doped germanium.

The mission was operated and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Spitzer Science Center,[23] located at IPAC on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California.

The telescope equilibrium temperature was then around 30 K (−243 °C; −406 °F), and IRAC continued to produce valuable images at those wavelengths as the "Spitzer Warm Mission".

[27] After receiving confirmation that the command was successful, Spitzer Project Manager Joseph Hunt officially declared that the mission had ended.

Since then, many monthly press releases have highlighted Spitzer's capabilities, as the NASA and ESA images do for the Hubble Space Telescope.

The telescope also discovered in April 2005 that Cohen-kuhi Tau/4 had a planetary disk that was vastly younger and contained less mass than previously theorized, leading to new understandings of how planets are formed.

Early speculation about the hot spot was that it might have been the faint light of another core that lies 10 times further from Earth but along the same line of sight as L1014.

Follow-up observation from ground-based near-infrared observatories detected a faint fan-shaped glow in the same location as the object found by Spitzer.

(Young et al., 2004) In 2005, astronomers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Whitewater determined, on the basis of 400 hours of observation on the Spitzer Space Telescope, that the Milky Way galaxy has a more substantial bar structure across its core than previously recognized.

Also in 2005, astronomers Alexander Kashlinsky and John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center reported that one of Spitzer's earliest images may have captured the light of the first stars in the universe.

An image of a quasar in the Draco constellation, intended only to help calibrate the telescope, was found to contain an infrared glow after the light of known objects was removed.

Kashlinsky and Mather are convinced that the numerous blobs in this glow are the light of stars that formed as early as 100 million years after the Big Bang, redshifted by cosmic expansion.

Scientists have long wondered how tiny silicate crystals, which need high temperatures to form, have found their way into frozen comets, born in the very cold environment of the Solar System's outer edges.

The crystals would have begun as non-crystallized, amorphous silicate particles, part of the mix of gas and dust from which the Solar System developed.

They detected the infrared signature of forsterite silicate crystals on the disk of dust and gas surrounding the star EX Lupi during one of its frequent flare-ups, or outbursts, seen by Spitzer in April 2008.

[48] MIPSGAL, a similar survey that complements GLIMPSE, covers 248° of the galactic disk[49] using the 24 and 70 μm channels of the MIPS instrument.

[50] On 3 June 2008, scientists unveiled the largest, most detailed infrared portrait of the Milky Way, created by stitching together more than 800,000 snapshots, at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri.

[54][55] In January 2012, it was reported that further analysis of the Spitzer observations of EX Lupi can be understood if the forsterite crystalline dust was moving away from the protostar at a remarkable average speed of 38 kilometres per second (24 mi/s).

[57] In April 2015, Spitzer and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment were reported as co-discovering one of the most distant planets ever identified: a gas giant about 13,000 light-years (4,000 pc) away from Earth.

[1] This separation provided significantly different perspectives of the brown dwarf, allowing for constraints to be placed on some of the object's physical characteristics.

This included doubling its stability by modifying its heating cycle, finding a new use for the "peak-up" camera, and analyzing the sensor at a sub-pixel level.

[64][65] Three of the discovered planets are located in the habitable zone, which means they are capable of supporting liquid water given sufficient parameters.