A European Space Agency (ESA) satellite launched on 14 May 2009. Herschel is the largest observatory ever launched that explored the universe in infrared wavelengths. It carried a 3.5-m infrared telescope for a study of the birth and evolution of stars and galaxies. The observatory, 7 m high and 4.3 m wide, also carried three scientific instruments: a high-resolution spectrometer, a photometer, and a camera. It was the only spacecraft so far to cover the far infrared to submillimetre range of the spectrum.
The observatory, named after the German-born English astronomer William Herschel, launched with the spacecraft Planck. The two craft separated after launch and operated independently at the L1 Lagrangian point 1.5 million km from the Earth. The telescope was decommissioned in April 2013 when it ran out of liquid coolant, as expected. However, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which contributed key technology to and analysed data from the ESA’s mission, are still looking over the data to unveil new discoveries, including a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the first oxygen molecules in space (discovered in the Orion star-forming complex), and a population of dust-enshrouded galaxies that do not need as much ‘dark matter’ as previously thought to trigger star formation. In September 2017, astronomers revealed that Herschel’s survey of over 12 billion years of star formation showed that some processes underlying galaxy evolution seem to be well understood, but many details remain unclear.