The Adventure of a Lifetime
My Spitzer story starts in 1999 when I was working on my PhD at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. I received a letter from the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) team at Cornell University encouraging me to apply for one of their position openings. They had seen my vitae at one of the AAS meetings earlier the same year.
Seeing Spitzer
I have no direct proof that Spitzer exists. I joined Spitzer relatively late, in 2007, four years after launch. I have never seen the spacecraft in a clean room, I did not know what my future held when one August day a rocket sent Spitzer into the sky between my junior and senior years of college, so I paid no attention to what seemed to be just another launch.
Spitzer: More than a space telescope. It is part of my family and a piece of who I am.
We often think about Spitzer as being a 16-year-old. That is the time it has been operating after its launch on a Delta II Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral. But, it is much older than that...
