Past and Present FIR Instruments

NASA s Spitzer space telescope (Werner et al. 2004), and more recently ESA s Herschel space observatory, both provide large area survey atlases across this FIR wavelength range. However, for most science cases, neither telescope has sufficient angular resolution to probe individual targets of interest in detail, and thereby study the physical processes which govern these sources. 

ESA s Herschel, launched in 2009, has yielded a major breakthrough for FIR astronomy. Its spatial resolution at 200 p,m is five times better than ISO and this has allowed imaging photometric and spectroscopic observations of the interstellar 

---