[meteorite-list] NASA's Wise Gets Ready to Survey the Whole Sky

[Ron Baalke]

Nov. 17, 2009

J.D. Harrington 
Headquarters, Washington 
202-358-5241 
j.d.harrington at nasa.gov 

Whitney Clavin 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
818-354-4673 
whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov 

RELEASE: 09-269

NASA'S WISE GETS READY TO SURVEY THE WHOLE SKY

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise, is 
chilled out, sporting a sunshade and getting ready to roll. NASA's 
newest spacecraft is scheduled to roll to the pad on Friday, Nov. 20, 
its last stop before launching into space to survey the entire sky in 
infrared light. 

Wise is scheduled to launch no earlier than 9:09 a.m. EST on Dec. 9 
from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will circle Earth 
over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine 
months. The mission will uncover hidden cosmic objects, including the 
coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies. 

"The eyes of Wise are a vast improvement over those of past infrared 
surveys," said Edward "Ned" Wright, the principal investigator for 
the mission at UCLA. "We will find millions of objects that have 
never been seen before." 

The mission will map the entire sky at four infrared wavelengths with 
sensitivity hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times greater than 
its predecessors, cataloging hundreds of millions of objects. The 
data will serve as navigation charts for other missions, pointing 
them to the most interesting targets. NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space 
Telescopes, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, 
and NASA's upcoming Sofia and James Webb Space Telescope will follow 
up on Wise finds. 

"This is an exciting time for space telescopes," said Jon Morse, 
NASA's Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in 
Washington. "Many of the telescopes will work together, each 
contributing different pieces to some of the most intriguing puzzles 
in our universe." 

Visible light is just one slice of the universe's electromagnetic 
rainbow. Infrared light, which humans can't see, has longer 
wavelengths and is good for seeing objects that are cold, dusty or 
far away. In our solar system, Wise is expected to find hundreds of 
thousands of cool asteroids, including hundreds that pass relatively 
close to Earth's path. Wise's infrared measurements will provide 
better estimates of asteroid sizes and compositions -- important 
information for understanding more about potentially hazardous 
impacts on Earth. 

"With infrared, we can find the dark asteroids other surveys have 
missed and learn about the whole population. Are they mostly big, 
small, fluffy or hard?" said Peter Eisenhardt, the Wise project 
scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. 

Wise also will find the coolest of the "failed" stars or brown dwarfs. 
Scientists speculate it is possible that a cool star lurks right 
under our noses, closer to us than our nearest known star, Proxima 
Centauri, which is four light-years away. If so, Wise will easily 
pick up its glow. 
The mission also will spot dusty nests of stars and swirling 
planet-forming disks, and may find the most luminous galaxy in the 
universe. 

To sense the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the Wise spacecraft 
cannot give off any detectable infrared light of its own. This is 
accomplished by chilling the telescope and detectors to ultra-cold 
temperatures. The coldest of Wise's detectors will operate at below 8 
Kelvin, or minus 445 Fahrenheit. 

"Wise is chilled out," said William Irace, the project manager at JPL. 
"We've finished freezing the hydrogen that fills two tanks 
surrounding the science instrument. We're ready to explore the 
universe in infrared." 

JPL manages Wise for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. 
The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program 
managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The 
science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in 
Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & 
Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data 
processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center 
at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 

More information about the Wise mission is available online at: 

http://www.nasa.gov/wise 
	
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