Space Shuttle Discovery March 9, having spent a cumulative total of almost a full year in space. "Discovery" performed both research and International Space Station (ISS) assembly missions. It also carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. "Discovery" was the first operational shuttle to be retired, followed by "Endeavour" and then "Atlantis". The name "Discovery" was chosen to carry on a tradition based on ships of exploration, primarily , one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook during his third and final major voyage from 1776 to 1779, and Henry Hudson's , which was used in 1610–1611 to explore Hudson Bay and
Spitzer Space Telescope obscuring effects of Earth's atmosphere. In 1979, a report from the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, "A Strategy for Space Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1980s", identified a Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) as "one of two major astrophysics facilities [to be developed] for Spacelab", a Shuttle-borne platform. Anticipating the major results from an upcoming Explorer satellite and from the Shuttle mission, the report also favored the "study and development of ... long-duration spaceflights of infrared telescopes cooled to cryogenic temperatures." The launch in January 1983 of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, jointly developed by the United