[meteorite-list] NASA's Wise Eye Spies First Glimpse of the Starry Sky

[Ron Baalke]

Jan. 6, 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: 10-005

NASA'S WISE EYE SPIES FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE STARRY SKY; 
INFRARED ALL-SKY SURVEYING TELESCOPE SENDS BACK FIRST IMAGES FROM SPACE

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has 
captured its first look at the starry sky that it will soon begin 
surveying in infrared light. 

Launched on Dec. 14, WISE will scan the entire sky for millions of 
hidden objects, including asteroids, "failed" stars and powerful 
galaxies. WISE data will serve as navigation charts for other 
missions such as NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, pointing 
them to the most interesting targets WISE finds. 

A new WISE infrared image was taken shortly after the space 
telescope's cover was removed, exposing the instrument's detectors to 
starlight for the first time. The picture shows 3,000 stars in the 
Carina constellation. It can be viewed online at: 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/wise20100106.html 

The image covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full 
moon. The patch was selected because it does not contain any 
unusually bright objects, which could damage instrument detectors if 
observed for too long. The picture was taken while the spacecraft was 
staring at a fixed patch of sky and is being used to calibrate the 
spacecraft's pointing system. 

When the WISE survey begins, the spacecraft will scan the sky 
continuously as it circles the globe, while an internal scan mirror 
counteracts its motion. This allows WISE to take "freeze-frame" 
snapshots every 11 seconds, resulting in millions of images of the 
entire sky. 

"Right now, we are busy matching the rate of the scan mirror to the 
rate of the spacecraft, so we will capture sharp pictures as our 
telescope sweeps across the sky," said William Irace, the mission's 
project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, 
Calif. 

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 less 
than 8 Kelvin, or minus 445 Fahrenheit. 

The first sky survey will be complete in six months, followed by a 
second scan of one-half of the sky lasting three months. The WISE 
mission ends when the frozen hydrogen that keeps the instrument cold 
evaporates away, an event expected to occur in October 2010. 

Preliminary survey images are expected to be released six months 
later, in April 2011, with the final atlas and catalog coming after 
another 11 months in March 2012. Selected images will be released to 
the public beginning in February 2010. 

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. 
The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers 
Program, managed by NASA's 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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