The door was scheduled to come off Sunday. The spacecraft carries a container similar to a thermos bottle that holds frozen hydrogen used to keep the telescope supercooled to temperatures below -436 degrees Fahrenheit. The instrument must be kept cold so its own heat emissions do not interfere with the infrared light it is trying to observe from space. Frank Redd said, when the cover was lost excessive heat may have caused the hydrogen to begin melting and escaping from vents which caused the spacecraft to spin, building up still more heat. We have people who have invested five years of their lives in this project and this is certainly not how we hoped it would go.
Space is a difficult place to work.
You consider all the challenges of the space environment and you test everything the best you can. But if something goes wrong you can't just go get your equipment and fix it. It's a risky place to do research, but there is nowhere else like it and nowhere else we can learn some of the things we learn in space. I guess that's why we love it so much. WIRE was to have given scientists a look at starburst galaxies and provided astronomers with images that could help explain the beginnings and evolution of the universe.