[meteorite-list] WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:46:15 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201104141946.p3EJkFrv018276_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-117

WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
April 14, 2011

Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions
of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data
from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

"Starting today thousands of new eyes will be looking at WISE data, and
I expect many surprises," said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the
mission's principal investigator.

WISE launched into space on Dec. 14, 2009 on a mission to map the entire
sky in infrared light with greatly improved sensitivity and resolution
over its predecessors. From its polar orbit, it scanned the skies about
one-and-a-half times while collecting images taken at four infrared
wavelengths of light. It took more than 2.7 million images over the
course of its mission, capturing objects ranging from faraway galaxies
to asteroids relatively close to Earth.

Like other infrared telescopes, WISE required coolant to chill its
heat-sensitive detectors. When this frozen hydrogen coolant ran out, as
expected, in early October, 2010, two of its four infrared channels were
still operational. The survey was then extended for four more months,
with the goal of finishing its sweep for asteroids and comets in the
main asteroid belt of our solar system.

The mission's nearby discoveries included 20 comets, more than 33,000
asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and 133 near-Earth objects (NEOs),
which are those asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28
million miles (about 45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the
sun. The satellite went into hibernation in early February of this year.

Today, WISE is taking the first major step in meeting its primary goal
of delivering the mission's trove of objects to astronomers. Data from
the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online
public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will
be made available in the spring of 2012. A predecessor to WISE, the
Infrared Astronomical Satellite, served a similar role about 25 years
ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise,
the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades.

"We are excited that the preliminary data contain millions of newfound
objects," said Fengchuan Liu, the project manager for WISE at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "But the mission is not yet over
-- the real treasure is the final catalog available a year from now,
which will have twice as many sources, covering the entire sky and
reaching even deeper into the universe than today's release."

Astronomers will use WISE's infrared data to hunt for hidden oddities,
and to study trends in large populations of known objects. Survey
missions often result in the unexpected discoveries too, because they
are looking everywhere in the sky rather than at known targets. Data
from the mission are also critical for finding the best candidates for
follow-up studies with other telescopes, including the European Space
Agency's Herschel observatory, which has important NASA contributions.

"WISE is providing the newest-generation 'address book' of the infrared
universe with the precise location and brightness of hundreds of
millions of celestial objects," said Roc Cutri, lead scientist for WISE
data processing at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE continues
the long tradition of infrared sky surveys supported by Caltech,
stretching back to the 1969 Two Micron Sky Survey."

So far, the WISE mission has released dozens of colorful images of the
cosmos, in which infrared light has been assigned colors we see with our
eyes. The whole collection can be seen at
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html .

The public archive for astronomers is online at
http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/prelim/index.html.
Instructions for astronomy enthusiasts wanting to try their hand at
using the archive are at
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/wise_image_service.html.

JPL manages and operates the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal
investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively
selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the
Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. 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 is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise.

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov

2011-117
Received on Thu 14 Apr 2011 03:46:15 PM PDT