Looking Back in Time

An instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory launched in May by the European Space Agency has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.

The December images have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, or SPIRE instrument, riding aboard Herschel। The new images are being analyzed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, or HerMES, which involves more than 100 astronomers from six countries।

Equipped with three cameras including SPIRE, the Herschel Space Observatory was launched in May 2009 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana। The spacecraft -- about one and one-half times the diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope -- is orbiting nearly 1 million miles from Earth. Herschel is the first space observatory to make high-resolution images at submillimeter wavelengths, which are longer than visible and infrared light waves and shorter than radio waves. SPIRE was designed to look for emissions from clouds and dust linked to star-forming regions in the Milky Way and beyond, said Glenn. The most recent observations were made in the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the Big Dipper.
CU-Boulder is receiving roughly $2 million from NASA for the combined support of SPIRE instrument development and science data analysis during the lifetime of the orbiting telescope, said Glenn, an associate professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and CU-Boulder built essential instrumentation for the telescope used to make the most recent observations, said Glenn, also a member of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.