Herschel mission has ended

On 29 April, the Herschel space telescope has ceased to function. Almost four years after launch, it has run out of liquid helium, necessary to cool the telescope's analytical equipment. On the Science LinX website, we have already looked back at the successful mission, to which University of Groningen astronomers and technicians at the space research lab SRON-Groningen made important contributions. The HIFI spectrometer was designed and built in Groningen. We also published a report on the farewell party for Herschel, on 18 april.

ESA has issued a press release on the end of the Herschel mission and is also looking ahead at the next stage: data analysis.

In Dutch, there were reports in (amongst others) the newspapers De Telegraaf, Nederlands Dagblad and the website Astronomie.nl.