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T. L. Roellig (NASA Ames Research Center), D. M. Watson (University of Rochester), K. I. Uchida (Cornell University), W. J. Forrest (University of Rochester), J. E. Van Cleve (Ball Aerospace Corp.), T. L. Herter, G. C. Sloan, E. Furlan (Cornell University), J. C. Wilson (University of Virginia), J. Bernard-Salas (Cornell University), D. Saumon (LANL), S. Leggett (UKIRT), C. Chen (JPL), F. Kemper (UCLA), L. Hartmann (SAO), M. Marley, M. Cushing (NASA Ames Research Center), A. K. Mainzer (JPL), D. Kirkpatrick (Caltech), M. Jura (UCLA), J. R. Houck (Cornell University)
The Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) on the Spitzer Space Telescope has now been in routine science operations since Dec. 14, 2003. The IRS Science Team has used a portion of their guaranteed time to pursue three major science themes in galactic astronomy: the evolution of protostellar disks and debris disks; the composition and evolution of diffuse matter and clouds in the interstellar medium; and the composition and structure of brown dwarfs and low-mass main-sequence stars. We report here on the results from the first five months of IRS observations in these programs. Full IRS Spectra have already been obtained for large samples of YSO/protoplanetary disks in the Taurus and TW Hya associations, and of debris disks around main-sequence stars, in which many aspects of the evolution of planetary systems can be addressed for the first time. As anticipated, the mid-infrared IRS observations of brown dwarfs have yielded important new information about their atmospheres, including the identification of NH3 and measurements of new methane features.
This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under NASA contract 1407. Support for this work was provided by NASA’s Office of Space Science.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #2
© YEAR. The American Astronomical Soceity.