NASA's WISE Mission Ready to Complete Extensive Sky Survey
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE,
will complete its first survey of the entire sky on July 17. The
mission has generated more than one million images so far, of
everything from asteroids to distant galaxies
"Like a globe-trotting shutterbug, WISE has completed a world tour
with 1.3 million slides covering the whole sky," said Edward Wright,
the principal investigator of the mission at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Some of these images have been processed and stitched together into a
new picture being released today. It shows the Pleiades cluster of
stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, resting in a tangled bed of
wispy dust. The pictured region covers seven square degrees, or an
area equivalent to 35 full moons, highlighting the telescope's
ability to take wide shots of vast regions of space.
The new picture was taken in February. It shows infrared light from
WISE's four detectors in a range of wavelengths. This infrared view
highlights the region's expansive dust cloud, through which the Seven
Sisters and other stars in the cluster are passing. Infrared light
also reveals the smaller and cooler stars of the family.
To view the new image, as well as previously released WISE images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
"The WISE all-sky survey is helping us sift through the immense and
diverse population of celestial objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE
Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It's a great
example of the high impact science that's possible from NASA's
Explorer Program."
The first release of WISE data, covering about 80 percent of the sky,
will be delivered to the astronomical community in May of next year.
The mission scanned strips of the sky as it orbited around the
Earth's poles since it launched last December. WISE always stays over
the Earth's day-night line. As the Earth moves around the sun, new
slices of sky come into the telescope's field of view. It has taken
six months, or the amount of time for Earth to travel halfway around
the sun, for the mission to complete one full scan of the entire sky.
For the next three months, the mission will map half of the sky again.
This will enhance the telescope's data, revealing more hidden
asteroids, stars and galaxies. The mapping will give astronomers a
look at what's changed in the sky. The mission will end when the
instrument's block of solid hydrogen coolant, needed to chill its
infrared detectors, runs out.
"The eyes of WISE have not blinked since launch," said William Irace,
the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif. "Both our telescope and spacecraft have performed
flawlessly and have imaged every corner of our universe, just as we planned."
So far, WISE has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, both known and
previously unseen. Most of these space rocks are in the main belt
between Mars and Jupiter. However, some are near-Earth objects,
asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth.
WISE has discovered more than 90 of these new near-Earth objects. The
infrared telescope is also good at spotting comets that orbit far
from Earth and has discovered more than a dozen of these so far.
WISE's infrared vision also gives it a unique ability to pick up the
glow of cool stars, called brown dwarfs, in addition to distant
galaxies bursting with light and energy. These galaxies are called
ultra-luminous infrared galaxies. WISE can see the brightest of them.
"WISE is filling in the blanks on the infrared properties of
everything in the universe from nearby asteroids to distant quasars,"
said Peter Eisenhardt of JPL, project scientist for WISE. "But the
most exciting discoveries may well be objects we haven't yet imagined exist."
JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was selected under
NASA's Explorers Program managed by the 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.
For more information about WISE, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu
Source: NASA
