Spitzer Space Telescope

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility or SIRTF) is an infrared space observatory, the fourth and final of NASA's Great Observatories.
The time frame of the mission will be a minimum of 2.5 years, with 5 or more optimal. In keeping with NASA tradition, the telescope was renamed after successful demonstration of operation, on December 18, 2003. Unlike most telescopes which are named after famous deceased astronomers by a board of scientists, the name for SIRTF was obtained from a contest open to the general public (to the delight of science educators).
The name chosen was that of Dr. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., the first to propose placing telescopes in space, in the mid-1940s.