[meteorite-list] NASA's WISE Mission Warms Up But Keeps Chugging Along

[Ron Baalke]

Oct. 4, 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: 10-246

NASA'S WISE MISSION WARMS UP BUT KEEPS CHUGGING ALONG

WASHINGTON -- After completing its primary mission to map the infrared 
sky, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has reached 
the expected end of its onboard supply of frozen coolant. Although 
WISE has 'warmed up,' NASA has decided the mission will still 
continue. WISE will now focus on our nearest neighbors -- the 
asteroids and comets traveling together with our solar system's 
planets around the sun. 

"Two of our four infrared detectors still work even at warmer 
temperatures, so we can use those bands to continue our hunt for 
asteroids and comets," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator 
of the new phase of the mission, now known as the NEOWISE 
Post-Cryogenic Mission. It takes its name from the acronym for a 
near-Earth object, NEO, and WISE. A cryogen is a coolant used to make 
the detectors more sensitive. In WISE's case, the cryogen was frozen 
hydrogen. 

WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, from Vandenberg Air Force Station in 
California aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. Its 16-inch infrared 
telescope scans the skies from an Earth-circling orbit crossing the 
poles. It has already snapped more than 1.8 million pictures at four 
infrared wavelengths. Currently, the survey has covered the sky about 
one-and-one-half times, producing a vast catalog containing hundreds 
of millions of objects from near-Earth asteroids to cool stars called 
"brown dwarfs" to distant, luminous galaxies. 

To date, WISE has discovered 19 comets and more than 33,500 asteroids, 
including 120 near-Earth objects, which are those bodies with orbits 
that pass relatively close to Earth's path around the sun. More 
discoveries regarding objects outside our solar system, such as the 
brown dwarfs and luminous galaxies, are expected. 

"The science data collected by WISE will be used by the scientific 
community for decades," said Jaya Bajpayee, the WISE program 
executive in the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission 
Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "It will also 
provide a sky map for future observatories like NASA's James Webb 
Space Telescope." 

The NEOWISE Post-Cryogenic Mission is designed to complete the survey 
of the solar system and finish the second survey of the rest of the 
sky at its new warmer temperature of about minus 334 degrees 
Fahrenheit using its two shortest-wavelength detectors. The survey 
extension will last one to four months, depending on early results. 

NEOWISE also will keep on observing other targets, such as the closest 
brown dwarfs to the sun. In addition, data from the second sky scan 
will help identify objects that have moved in the sky since they were 
first detected by WISE. This allows astronomers to pick out the brown 
dwarfs closest to our sun. The closer the object is, the more it will 
appear to move from our point of view. 

The WISE science team now is analyzing millions of objects captured in 
the images, including many never seen before. A first batch of WISE 
data, covering more than half the sky, will be released to the 
astronomical community in spring 2011, with the rest to follow about 
one year later. 

"WISE has provided a guidebook to the universe with thousands of 
targets worth viewing with a large telescope," said Edward (Ned) 
Wright, WISE principal investigator from University of California, 
Los Angeles. "We're working on figuring out just how far away the 
brown dwarfs are, and how luminous the galaxies are." 

A gallery of WISE images is available at 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/gallery-index.html 

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for the Science 
Mission Directorate. 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. 

For information about WISE, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/wise 
	
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