[meteorite-list] NASA's WISE Mission Releases Medley of First Images

[Ron Baalke]

Feb. 17, 2010

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: 10-038

NASA'S WISE MISSION RELEASES MEDLEY OF FIRST IMAGES

WASHINGTON -- A diverse cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the 
first survey images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field 
Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. 

Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 
14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a 
million raw, infrared images. Four new, processed pictures illustrate 
a sampling of the mission's targets -- a wispy comet, a bursting 
star-forming cloud, the grand Andromeda galaxy and a faraway cluster 
of hundreds of galaxies. The images are online at: 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html 

"WISE has worked superbly," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of 
the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 
"These first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of 
helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be 
just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the 
entire sky in infrared." 

One image shows the beauty of a comet called Siding Spring. As the 
comet parades toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared 
light visible to WISE. The comet's tail, which stretches about 10 
million miles, looks like a streak of red paint. A bright star 
appears below it in blue. 

"We've got a candy store of images coming down from space," said 
Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator for WISE. 
"Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all." 

During its survey, the mission is expected to find perhaps dozens of 
comets, including some that ride along in orbits that take them 
somewhat close to Earth's path around the sun. WISE will help unravel 
clues locked inside comets about how our solar system came to be. 

Another image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 
3603, lying 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our 
Milky Way galaxy. This star-forming factory is churning out batches 
of new stars, some of which are monstrously massive and hotter than 
the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding dust clouds, causing them 
to glow at infrared wavelengths. 

WISE will see hundreds of similar star-making regions in our galaxy, 
helping astronomers piece together a picture of how stars are born. 
The observations also provide an important link to understanding 
violent episodes of star formation in distant galaxies. Because NGC 
3603 is much closer, astronomers use it as a lab to probe the same 
type of action that is taking place billions of light-years away. 

Traveling farther out from our Milky Way, the third new image shows 
our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Andromeda is 
a bit bigger than our Milky Way and about 2.5 million light-years 
away. The new picture highlights WISE's wide field of view -- it 
covers an area larger than 100 full moons and even shows other 
smaller galaxies near Andromeda, all belonging to our "local group" 
of more than about 50 galaxies. WISE will capture the entire local 
group. 

The fourth WISE picture is even farther out, in a region of hundreds 
of galaxies all bound together into one family. Called the Fornax 
cluster, these galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The 
mission's infrared views reveal both stagnant and active galaxies, 
providing a census of data on an entire galactic community. 

"All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny," 
said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE sees dusty comets and 
rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of our solar 
system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems 
across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation 
across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in 
clusters millions of light years away." 

Other mission targets include comets, asteroids and cool stars called 
brown dwarfs. WISE discovered its first near-Earth asteroid on Jan. 
12 and first comet on Jan. 22. The mission will scan the sky 
one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant 
needed to chill its instruments will be depleted. 

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

For more information about WISE, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/wise 

To read about the near-Earth asteroid WISE discovered Jan. 12, visit: 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/newsfeatures.cfm?release=2459 

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