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Mercury, May/June 2002 Table of Contents

by Michelle Thaller

Infrared astronomy is truly coming of age. Many of NASA’s most important and ambitious upcoming missions, including SOFIA, the Next Generation Space Telescope, and Terrestrial Planet Finder, feature infrared telescopes, so the stage is being set for infrared science to play a leading role in the study of the universe for the coming decades.

The next major infrared mission is the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), a cryogenic space telescope set to launch in early 2003. SIRTF was originally conceived to be the fourth and final installment of NASA’s Great Observatories, a fleet of space telescopes designed to give astronomers a view of the universe across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. With the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory having completed its mission, and with the other two Great Observatories (Hubble and Chandra) still in place, SIRTF stands poised not just to round out the program, but also to connect that program solidly into NASA’s new initiative, the search for humanity’s cosmic origins.