[meteorite-list] NASA Releases New WISE Mission Catalog Of Entire Infrared Sky

[Ron Baalke]

Mar. 14, 2012

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: 12-082

NASA RELEASES NEW WISE MISSION CATALOG OF ENTIRE INFRARED SKY

WASHINGTON -- NASA unveiled a new atlas and catalog of the entire 
infrared sky today showing more than a half billion stars, galaxies 
and other objects captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer 
(WISE) mission. 

"Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the 
astronomical community," said Edward Wright, WISE principal 
investigator at UCLA, who first began working on the mission with 
other team members in 1998. 

WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, and mapped the entire sky in 2010 with 
vastly better sensitivity than its predecessors. It collected more 
than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light, 
capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies. Since 
then, the team has been processing more than 15 trillion bytes of 
returned data. A preliminary release of WISE data, covering the first 
half of the sky surveyed, was made last April. 

The WISE catalog of the entire sky meets the mission's fundamental 
objective. The individual WISE exposures have been combined into an 
atlas of more than 18,000 images covering the sky and a catalog 
listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual 
objects found in the images. Most of the objects are stars and 
galaxies, with roughly equal numbers of each. Many of them have never 
been seen before. 

WISE observations have led to numerous discoveries, including the 
elusive, coolest class of stars. Astronomers hunted for these failed 
stars, called "Y-dwarfs," for more than a decade. Because they have 
been cooling since their formation, they don't shine in visible light 
and could not be spotted until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared 
vision. 

WISE also took a poll of near-Earth asteroids, finding there are 
significantly fewer mid-size objects than previously thought. It also 
determined NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest 
near-Earth asteroids. 

Other discoveries were unexpected. WISE found the first known "Trojan" 
asteroid to share the same orbital path around the sun as Earth. One 
of the images released today shows a surprising view of an "echo" of 
infrared light surrounding an exploded star. The echo was etched in 
the clouds of gas and dust when the flash of light from the supernova 
explosion heated surrounding clouds. At least 100 papers on the 
results from the WISE survey already have been published. More 
discoveries are expected now that astronomers have access to the 
whole sky as seen by the spacecraft. 

"With the release of the all-sky catalog and atlas, WISE joins the 
pantheon of great sky surveys that have led to many remarkable 
discoveries about the universe," said Roc Cutri, who leads the WISE 
data processing and archiving effort at the Infrared and Processing 
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in 
Pasadena. "It will be exciting and rewarding to see the innovative 
ways the science and educational communities will use WISE in their 
studies now that they have the data at their fingertips." 


NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages 
and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in 
Washington. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's 
Explorers Program, which is 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 and Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo. 
Science operations, data processing and archiving take place at the 
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute 
of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. 

For a collection of WISE images released to date, visit: 

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html 

An introduction and quick guide to accessing the WISE all-sky archive 
for astronomers is online at: 

http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/ 

For more information about WISE, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/wise 
	
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