In late 1998,
NICMOS ran out of coolant before Schneider's team could track the motion of the object near TWA 6.
The NICMOS photometry supports the conjecture the planet candidate is about five times the mass of Jupiter if it indeed orbits the brown dwarf," said Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
The HST NICMOS observations found the object to be extremely red and relatively much brighter at longer wavelengths.
Camera 3 is the only NICMOS detector that has a spectrograph, a device that divides light into its component wavelengths.
A more serious problem, notes NICMOS researcher Marcia J.
NICMOS should further unveil dust-shrouded regions of starbirth in the Milky Way and continue the search for primeval galaxies billions of light-years distant.
In particular,
NICMOS can detect a planet 400 light-years away-- as distant as the Pleiades star cluster--if the body has at least six times Jupiter's mass and travels in a sufficiently wide orbit.
STIS will serve as the telescope's color vision, while
NICMOS will expand the colors it can detect into the infrared wavelength.
collaborated on the designs of the instrument, known as
NICMOS (near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrograph).
Utilizing near-infrared detectors,
NICMOS will be able to peer through nebular dust clouds in space, the stellar nurseries of new stars, and penetrate within them to record the birth of new solar systems.
