[meteorite-list] NASA'S Neowise Completes Scan For Asteroids And Comets

[Marshall Eubanks]

Ron, do you have any idea when orbits etc. for all of these objects will be publicly released ?

Regards
Marshall

 
On Feb 1, 2011, at 7:23 PM, Ron Baalke wrote:

> 
> 
> Feb. 1, 2011
> 
> Trent Perrotto/Dwayne Brown 
> Headquarters, Washington                                
> 202-358-5241/1726 
> trent.j.perrotto at nasa.gov 
> dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov 
> 
> Whitney Clavin 
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
> 818-354-4673 
> whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov 
> 
> RELEASE: 11-029
> 
> NASA'S NEOWISE COMPLETES SCAN FOR ASTEROIDS AND COMETS
> 
> WASHINGTON -- NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small 
> bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's 
> discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more 
> than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 
> 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with 
> orbits that come within 28 million miles of Earth's path around the 
> sun. 
> 
> NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, 
> or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the 
> entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured 
> more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from 
> faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth. 
> 
> In early October 2010, after completing its prime science mission, the 
> spacecraft ran out of frozen coolant that keeps its instrumentation 
> cold. However, two of its four infrared cameras remained operational. 
> These two channels were still useful for asteroid hunting, so NASA 
> extended the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission by four months, with 
> the primary purpose of hunting for more asteroids and comets, and to 
> finish one complete scan of the main asteroid belt. 
> 
> "Even just one year of observations from the NEOWISE project has 
> significantly increased our catalog of data on NEOs and the other 
> small bodies of the solar systems," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's 
> program executive for the NEO Observation Program. 
> Now that NEOWISE has successfully completed a full sweep of the main 
> asteroid belt, the WISE spacecraft will go into hibernation mode and 
> remain in polar orbit around the Earth, where it could be called back 
> into service in the future. 
> 
> In addition to discovering new asteroids and comets, NEOWISE also 
> confirmed the presence of objects in the main belt that already had 
> been detected. In just one year, it observed about 153,000 rocky 
> bodies out of approximately 500,000 known objects. Those include the 
> 33,000 that NEOWISE discovered. 
> 
> NEOWISE also observed known objects closer and farther to us than the 
> main belt, including roughly 2,000 asteroids that orbit along with 
> Jupiter, hundreds of NEOs and more than 100 comets. 
> 
> These observations will be key to determining the objects' sizes and 
> compositions. Visible-light data alone reveals how much sunlight 
> reflects off an asteroid, whereas infrared data is much more directly 
> related to the object's size. By combining visible and infrared 
> measurements, astronomers also can learn about the compositions of 
> the rocky bodies -- for example, whether they are solid or crumbly. 
> The findings will lead to a much-improved picture of the various 
> asteroid populations. 
> 
> NEOWISE took longer to survey the whole asteroid belt than WISE took 
> to scan the entire sky because most of the asteroids are moving in 
> the same direction around the sun as the spacecraft moves while it 
> orbits the Earth. The spacecraft field of view had to catch up to, 
> and lap, the movement of the asteroids in order to see them all. 
> 
> "You can think of Earth and the asteroids as racehorses moving along 
> in a track," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE 
> at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're moving 
> along together around the sun, but the main belt asteroids are like 
> horses on the outer part of the track. They take longer to orbit than 
> us, so we eventually lap them." 
> 
> NEOWISE data on the asteroid and comet orbits are catalogued at the 
> NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a 
> clearinghouse for information about all solar system bodies at the 
> Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. The science 
> team is analyzing the infrared observations now and will publish new 
> findings in the coming months. 
> 
> When combined with WISE observations, NEOWISE data will aid in the 
> discovery of the closest dim stars, called brown dwarfs. These 
> observations have the potential to reveal a brown dwarf even closer 
> to us than our closest known star, Proxima Centauri, if such an 
> object does exist. Likewise, if there is a hidden gas-giant planet in 
> the outer reaches of our solar system, data from WISE and NEO-WISE 
> could detect it. 
> 
> The first batch of observations from the WISE mission will be 
> available to the public and astronomical community in April. 
> "WISE has unearthed a mother lode of amazing sources, and we're having 
> a great time figuring out their nature," said Edward (Ned) Wright, 
> the principal investigator of WISE at UCLA. 
> 
> JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the 
> agency's headquarters in Washington. 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. JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Planetary 
> Sciences Division. The mission's data processing also takes place at 
> the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. 
> 
> For more information about WISE, visit: 
> 
> http://www.nasa.gov/wise 
> 	
> -end-
> 
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