[meteorite-list] NEOWISE Celebrates First Month of Operations After Reactivation

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-023

NEOWISE Celebrates First Month of Operations After Reactivation
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 23, 2014

Mission Status Report

In its first 25 days of operations, the newly reactivated NEOWISE mission 
has detected 857 minor bodies in our solar system, including 22 near-Earth 
objects (NEOs) and four comets. Three of the NEOs are new discoveries; 
all three are hundreds of meters in diameter and dark as coal.

The mission has just passed its post-restart survey readiness review, 
and the project has verified that the ability to measure asteroid positions 
and brightness is as good as it was before the spacecraft entered hibernation 
in early 2011. At the present rate, NEOWISE is observing and characterizing 
approximately one NEO per day, giving astronomers a much better idea of 
the objects' sizes and compositions.

Out of the more than 10,500 NEOs that have been discovered to date, only 
about 10 percent have had any physical measurements made of them; the 
reactivated NEOWISE will more than double that number.

JPL manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate 
in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the 
science instrument. 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. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information on NEOWISE is online at: 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/ 


Whitney Clavin/DC Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov / agle at jpl.nasa.gov

2014-023