James R. Houck papers

Jim Houck is the Principal Investigator for the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) instrument on Spitzer, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility formerly called SIRTF. Spitzer was launched on August 25, 2003, and is the fourth and last of NASA's Great Observatories, the others being Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO), and Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facilities (AXAF). Jim pioneered the use of mid-infrared spectrometers to determine the physical conditions inside a wide variety of astronomical objects from the giant planet Jupiter to distant galaxies. Early in his career he built infrared instruments launched on sounding rockets for brief, five minute peaks at the sky from above the atmosphere. Among the results from that work were the first discovery of the very high luminosities of star forming regions in our galaxy. These results were challenged in the literature until they were solidly confirmed by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) more than ten years later. Jim was a member of the science team that launched IRAS in 1983. In addition to IRAS and IRS, Jim also led the Cornell development of the state-of-the-art instrumentation for the 5-meter telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The first major instrument developed at Cornell for this site was SpectroCam, a thermal infrared camera and spectrograph operating near the diffraction limit of the telescope.