The growing legacy of a Great Observatory: Spitzer publications

Abstract

After 16.5 years the Spitzer Space Telescope was decommissioned on 30Jan2020. We present a look at the legacy of Spitzer: the 9200+ papers that have used data from the telescope and are catalogued in the Spitzer Bibliographical Database. Over the lifetime of this Great Observatory, cryogenic depletion and budget constraints brought on operational changes that in turn impacted the publication rates. This paper looks into the differences in publication rates between the Spitzer cryogenic and warm missions, and identifies those fields on the sky with especially high data reuse rates and many papers. In addition it provides a look into the citations of Spitzer fundamental papers, as well as how well authors identified the data they used. From data that were used once, to data that were used many times; the legacy of the Spitzer mission continues to grow even after the data collection has finished, and its full impact will not be known for years to come.