Making the Invisible Visible; A History of the Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility (1971-2003) NASA SP-2017-4547

Format is approximately 8.5 inches by 11 inches. xivm 196 pages. Footnotes. Illustrations (Figures and Tables). Bibliography. Cover has some wear and soiling. This is Monographs in Aerospace History N. 47. Renee Rottner is a Teaching Professor (Lecturer SOE) of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Rottner was an Assistant Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, in the department of Management and Organizations, where she taught leadership and entrepreneurship courses. Dr. Rottner's research and teaching focuses on innovation, particularly how innovators can improve the development of new ideas and new firms. She has examined the dynamics of innovation in a range of settings, including Caltech spinouts, NASA projects, semiconductor startups, and Federal nanotechnology initiatives. Professor Rottner has received research funding from NASA and best paper awards from the Strategic Management Society, the Academy of Management, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies. She has written a book on the history of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and has published articles in the Academy of Management Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and Organizational Dynamics. Currently, she serves on the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal. She received her Ph.D. in Management from UC Irvine. In the early 1970s, there was a small group of advocates for an infrared space telescope; however, the field of infrared astronomy was only a few years old, and no one had ever built a space-based observatory of the required complexity. Considering the technical, political, scientific, and economic uncertainties, it was not obvious that a project like SIRTF could-or should-be dared by NASA. How did SIRTF manage to overcome these uncertainties? This monograph makes visible the invisible forces that influenced the design of SIRTF's innovative technology. The lessons learned by the project team over the course of building SIRTF, now better known as the Spitzer Space Telescope, are about managing innovation over time and in the face of uncertainty. The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), was an infrared space telescope launched in 2003. Operations ended on 30 January 2020. Spitzer was the third space telescope dedicated to infrared astronomy, following IRAS (1983) and ISO (1995-1998). It was the first spacecraft to use an Earth-trailing orbit, later used by the Kepler planet-finder. The planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009. Without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very low temperatures needed to operate, most of the instruments were no longer usable. However, the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate with the same sensitivity as before the helium was exhausted, and continued to be used into early 2020 in the Spitzer Warm Mission. During the warm mission, the two short wavelength channels of IRAC operated at 28.7 K and were predicted to experience little to no degradation at this temperature compared to the nominal mission. The Spitzer data, from both the primary and warm phases, are archived at the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). In keeping with NASA tradition, the telescope was renamed after its successful demonstration of operation, on 18 December 2003. Unlike most telescopes that are named by a board of scientists, typically after famous deceased astronomers, the new name for SIRTF was obtained from a contest open to the general public. The contest led to the telescope being named in honor of astronomer Lyman Spitzer, who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s. Spitzer wrote a 1946 report for RAND.…