One of the best things about all the scientific data collected over the centuries is that it doesn’t go to waste and is still useful – and used – to this day. People go back through Harvard’s glass plates to find objects only recently discovered. Moon rocks from the Apollo missions are being released from the vaults and tested now. And more recently ended missions such as Kepler have petabytes of data to comb through.

And now astronomers have combined the data from several retired missions to create improved images of known objects.

The team started with images taken by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, which was retired in 2013. Herschel’s instruments looked at the universe in far-infrared light and revealed massive amounts of interstellar dust, giving us detailed images of structures in those clouds. But Herschel couldn’t see the light from clouds that were more diffuse and spread out, meaning the images missed 30% of the light from the dust.

So astronomers added in the data from three other retired missions: ESA’s Planck Observatory and NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). And then they added in data collected by radio telescopes from around the world.

And new features appeared. For example, a new tail of gas can be seen coming off the Large Magellanic Cloud that wasn’t imaged before. Christopher Clark from the Space Science Telescope Institute led the work and notes: These improved Herschel images show us that the dust ‘ecosystems’ in these galaxies are very dynamic.

More Information

NASA JPL press release