Edison and radiatively-cooled IR space observatories

Radiative cooling of IR space telescopes is an alternative to embedding within massive cryostats and should offer advantages for future missions, including longer life, larger aperture for a fixed spacecraft size, lower cost due to less complex engineering, and easier ground handling. Relatively simple analyses of conventional designs show that it is possible to achieve telescope temperatures in the range of 25 to 40 K at distances from the sun of about 1 AU. Lower temperatures may be possible with “open” designs or distant orbits. At 25 K, an observatory will be limited by the celestial thermal background in the near- and mid-IR and by the confusion limit in the far-IR. We outline here our concept for a moderate aperture ( 1.75 m; Ariane 4 or Atlas launch) international space observatory for the next decade.