http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/news/herschel20130305.html
If any of you are interested in the universe and stuff like that then read on. Its pretty cool.
It is cool as in observing stuff that is 20-30 degrees above absolute zero
Herschel is a great mission and a success to the European space agency (ESA). The NASA contribution to the mission was quite minor. There are so many cool things regarding the technical aspects of it, for example:
* This "satellite" does not orbit the earth like normal satelites - it orbits a point called "Lagrange 2" on the continuation of the line sun-earth and rotates together with the earth around the sun, so relatively to the telescope, the sun and earth are aligned at the same direction at all times. Just the flight to this point took about 3 months.
* It was launched with another satellite called "Planck" in a 2-for-1 deal. Both were installed on top of each other on the same rocket and sent to the same distant orbit (at Lagrange 2).
* it has the largest mirror in space and there were some fears that the construction will not withstand the shakes of the launch. It held out nicely though.
* The mirror was built slightly deformed and shrank into the correct shape and focus as the structure was cooled in space. This was a risk since the instruments do not include a focus adjustment ability.
* It is a "scanning" telescope that has a tiny field of view. The images are created by slewing the telescope across the imaged area and then reconstructing the full image from the continuous scan.
* At far-infrared wavelengths, the brightest thing that the cameras see is the mirror of the telescope. At these wavelengths, the instruments and spacecraft themselves shine much brighter than the astronomical sources. Spotting a dust obscured galaxy 10 billion light years away over the light emitted from the telescope itself is worse then observing a firefly sitting on a football stadium lighting tower.
