Sulfur hexafluoride (SF
6) is a greenhouse gas of very long lifetime. Its infrared absorption spectrum is very important in modeling the atmospheric radiation balances. The SF
6is also a prototypical system for studying the principles and techniques of laser isotope separation using powerful infrared lasers. As a very heavy molecule, the infrared spectrum of SF
6at room temperature is very dense, which poses a great challenge to monitoring the relative abundances of different SF
6isotopomers by direct absorption spectroscopy. Supersonic jet expansions have been widely used to simplify the gas phase molecular spectra. In this work, astigmatic multi-pass absorption cell and distributed feed-back quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are used to measure jet-cooled rovibrational absorption spectra of
32SF
6and
33SF
6at 10.6 μm. The spectrometer works in a segmented rapid-scan mode. The gas mixtures (SF
6∶Ar∶He = 0.12∶1∶100) are expanded through an 80 mm
$ \times $
300 μm pulsed slit nozzle. Two QCLs running at room temperature are used and each one covers a spectral range of about 3.0 cm
–1. The
v
3fundamental bands of both
32SF
6and
33SF
6are observed. The rotational temperature of
32SF
6and
33SF
6in the ground state in the supersonic jet are both estimated at 10 K and the linewidth is about 0.0008 cm
–1by comparing the simulated spectrum with the observed spectrum with the PGOPHER program. A new weak vibrational band centered around 941.0 cm
–1is observed and tentatively assigned to the (
v
1+
v
2+
v
3)–(
v
1+
v
2) hot band of
32SF
6. The effective Hamiltonian used to analyze the rovibrational spectrum of SF
6is briefly introduced. A simplified rotational analysis for this hot band is performed with the XTDS program developed by the Dijon group. The band-origin of this hot band is determined to be 941.1785(21) cm
–1. The rotational temperature of this hot band is estimated at 50 K. A new scheme by measuring the jet-cooled absorption spectrum of this hot band of
32SF
6and the
v
3fundamental band of
33SF
6is proposed for measuring the relative abundance of
33SF
6/
32SF
6.