Astronomy Colloquium

The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched on August 25, 2003 with a planned 5 year cryogenic mission. After the cryogenic mission ended with the exhaustion of liquid Helium on May 15, 2009, the Spitzer Warm Mission, using only the 3.6 and 4.5mm channels of the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) instrument, began on July 28, 2009.  The warm mission will continue until (at least) 30 November 2019.   After briefly describing the mission and its torturous path to launch, I'll describe a small fraction of the compelling science currently emerging from the warm mission, with emphasis on the newest exciting results in transient astronomy, galaxies observed  less than a billion years after the Big Bang, and studies of "hot Jupiter" exoplanets and earth-sized rocky exoplanets in or near the habitable zone of their host star.