NASA’S WISE RESURRECTED TO HUNT ASTEROIDS NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WI
NASA’S WISE RESURRECTED TO HUNT ASTEROIDSNASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft was launched in December 2009 and its primary mission was to look for the glow of celestial heat sources from asteroids, stars and galaxies. From January 2010 to February 2011, WISE made around 7,500 images every day of asteroids, comets, stars, galaxies and other objects. In total, WISE captured more than 2.7 million images in multiple infrared wavelengths and catalogued more than 560 million objects in space. The spacecraft was also part of a project called NEOWISE, where it made the most accurate survey yet of NEOs; NEOWISE observed about 158,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 600,000 known objects during 2010. After completing its primary mission, NASA turned off most of WISE’s electronics off.In 2013, Wise was taken out of hibernation to discover and characterise near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are space rocks that orbit within 45 million kilometres (28 million miles) from Earth’s path around the Sun. WISE was responsible for discovering and characterising tens of thousands of asteroids within our solar system before it was placed into hibernation. WISE’s mission will aid NASA in identifying potentially hazardous NEOs as well as those that could be suitable for asteroid explorations. NASA hopes WISE will be able to use its 40-centimetre (16-inch) telescope to discover about 150 more NEOs, and also characterise the size, albedo and thermal properties of about 2,000 others. This asteroid initiative will be the first mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid. As John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science in Washington says: “Reactivating WISE is an excellent example of how we are leveraging existing capabilities across the agency to achieve our goal.”WISE Infrared sensors are used for discovering and cataloguing NEOs, as asteroids reflect but do not emit visible light. The albedo of an object, which is its ability to reflect light, can make a small bright object appear the same as a large dark one, hence why data collected with optical telescopes using visible light can be misleading.The image is an artist’s concept of the WISE spacecraft in its orbit of Earth.-TELhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-257Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech__ -- source link
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