[meteorite-list] WISE Satellite Will Look For Asteroids

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Nov 24 13:35:22 2004
Message-ID: <200411241811.KAA24327_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595107626,00.html

Sky's the limit for USU project -- an orbiting NASA telescope
By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
November 24, 2004

      Under a $40 million NASA contract, Utah State University is to
build an orbiting infrared telescope able to examine strange luminous
galaxies, find new stars and perhaps help protect Earth from asteroids.
      Dubbed WISE, for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the
telescope is scheduled for launch in 2008. It will detect infrared
light, such as heat radiation, coming from objects that are not
currently detectable.
      The telescope will map the entire sky, according to a Web site
posted by the University of California at Berkeley. It will be
"searching for the nearest and coolest stars, the origins of stellar and
planetary systems and the most luminous galaxies in the universe."
      The overall cost of the project is $208 million, with USU's Space
Dynamics Laboratory receiving $40 million over three years to build the
instrument, according to USU.
      According to project scientist Peter Eisenhardt of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, at some wavelengths WISE will be 500
times more sensitive than previous infrared surveys and at others,
500,000 times more sensitive.
      "Probably the most exciting thing about WISE for me is the
potential of finding a star closer to the sun than any we know about
now," he said. Scientists believe "we haven't found about two-thirds of
the closest stars to the sun because they're really faint and cool and
dim," he added in a telephone interview.
      WISE might detect hundreds of brown stars, which are smaller stars
that never ignited with the fusion reaction that makes our own sun blaze.
      Harry Ames, deputy director of the Space Dynamics Laboratory, told
the Deseret Morning News on Tuesday that work will go on at SDL for
about 2 1/2 years.
      "We're basically beginning that now," he said. "We've been through
several major reviews, and full funding has been turned on with this new
federal fiscal year," which began Oct. 1.
      WISE will be the first infrared telescope in 22 years to carry out
a survey of the whole sky.
      "This one's pretty exciting," Ames said. "We'll be seeing probably
upwards of 100,000 new asteroids out there."
      That's an estimate, he said, since nobody knows for certain how
many there are.
      "We think there are that many," he added.
      Some of them might turn out to be of the Earth-crossing variety,
asteroids whose own orbits take them across the orbit of Earth. If one
happened to swing close to our planet, perhaps gravity would draw it to
Earth with catastrophic consequences. However, if WISE can detect the
asteroid, a defense might be possible.
      Astronomical modeling predicts there should be stars closer to our
own solar system than the nearest known system to our own, Alpha
Centauri. Maybe we don't see them because they are "dark stars, meaning
they didn't quite explode into full suns," Ames said.
      While not brightly lit, these objects, denoted brown dwarfs, put
out a great deal of heat. WISE could discover them by the infrared glow.
      The telescope also will search for galaxies that are billions of
years old, whose starlight began traveling through space "long before
Earth ever coalesced into Earth," he added.
      "We'll be looking at how galaxies have evolved and how solar
systems have evolved."
      Asked the reason that WISE will be so much more sensitive than
previous infrared survey projects, Ames said it is because of "just a
22-year improvement in computers and in infrared focal planes."
      The telescope itself will be relatively small, with a diameter of
just under 20 inches. It will be inexpensive for a NASA observatory,
$208 million, compared with the price of the Hubble orbiting telescope.
Ames said that visible-light telescope cost billions of dollars.
Received on Wed 24 Nov 2004 01:11:27 PM PST