[meteorite-list] NASA'S Neowise Completes Scan For Asteroids And Comets

From: Marshall Eubanks <tme_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 12:51:41 -0500
Message-ID: <59E32D80-6429-4221-A804-DE2193864A45_at_americafree.tv>

Ron, do you have any idea when orbits etc. for all of these objects will be publicly released ?

Regards
Marshall

 
On Feb 1, 2011, at 7:23 PM, Ron Baalke wrote:

>
>
> Feb. 1, 2011
>
> Trent Perrotto/Dwayne Brown
> Headquarters, Washington
> 202-358-5241/1726
> trent.j.perrotto at nasa.gov
> dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov
>
> Whitney Clavin
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
> 818-354-4673
> whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov
>
> RELEASE: 11-029
>
> NASA'S NEOWISE COMPLETES SCAN FOR ASTEROIDS AND COMETS
>
> WASHINGTON -- NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small
> bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's
> discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more
> than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and
> 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with
> orbits that come within 28 million miles of Earth's path around the
> sun.
>
> NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer,
> or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the
> entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured
> more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from
> faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth.
>
> In early October 2010, after completing its prime science mission, the
> spacecraft ran out of frozen coolant that keeps its instrumentation
> cold. However, two of its four infrared cameras remained operational.
> These two channels were still useful for asteroid hunting, so NASA
> extended the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission by four months, with
> the primary purpose of hunting for more asteroids and comets, and to
> finish one complete scan of the main asteroid belt.
>
> "Even just one year of observations from the NEOWISE project has
> significantly increased our catalog of data on NEOs and the other
> small bodies of the solar systems," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's
> program executive for the NEO Observation Program.
> Now that NEOWISE has successfully completed a full sweep of the main
> asteroid belt, the WISE spacecraft will go into hibernation mode and
> remain in polar orbit around the Earth, where it could be called back
> into service in the future.
>
> In addition to discovering new asteroids and comets, NEOWISE also
> confirmed the presence of objects in the main belt that already had
> been detected. In just one year, it observed about 153,000 rocky
> bodies out of approximately 500,000 known objects. Those include the
> 33,000 that NEOWISE discovered.
>
> NEOWISE also observed known objects closer and farther to us than the
> main belt, including roughly 2,000 asteroids that orbit along with
> Jupiter, hundreds of NEOs and more than 100 comets.
>
> These observations will be key to determining the objects' sizes and
> compositions. Visible-light data alone reveals how much sunlight
> reflects off an asteroid, whereas infrared data is much more directly
> related to the object's size. By combining visible and infrared
> measurements, astronomers also can learn about the compositions of
> the rocky bodies -- for example, whether they are solid or crumbly.
> The findings will lead to a much-improved picture of the various
> asteroid populations.
>
> NEOWISE took longer to survey the whole asteroid belt than WISE took
> to scan the entire sky because most of the asteroids are moving in
> the same direction around the sun as the spacecraft moves while it
> orbits the Earth. The spacecraft field of view had to catch up to,
> and lap, the movement of the asteroids in order to see them all.
>
> "You can think of Earth and the asteroids as racehorses moving along
> in a track," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE
> at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're moving
> along together around the sun, but the main belt asteroids are like
> horses on the outer part of the track. They take longer to orbit than
> us, so we eventually lap them."
>
> NEOWISE data on the asteroid and comet orbits are catalogued at the
> NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a
> clearinghouse for information about all solar system bodies at the
> Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. The science
> team is analyzing the infrared observations now and will publish new
> findings in the coming months.
>
> When combined with WISE observations, NEOWISE data will aid in the
> discovery of the closest dim stars, called brown dwarfs. These
> observations have the potential to reveal a brown dwarf even closer
> to us than our closest known star, Proxima Centauri, if such an
> object does exist. Likewise, if there is a hidden gas-giant planet in
> the outer reaches of our solar system, data from WISE and NEO-WISE
> could detect it.
>
> The first batch of observations from the WISE mission will be
> available to the public and astronomical community in April.
> "WISE has unearthed a mother lode of amazing sources, and we're having
> a great time figuring out their nature," said Edward (Ned) Wright,
> the principal investigator of WISE at UCLA.
>
> JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the
> agency's headquarters in Washington. The mission was competitively
> selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space
> Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics
> Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and 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. JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Planetary
> Sciences Division. The mission's data processing also takes place at
> the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.
>
> For more information about WISE, visit:
>
> http://www.nasa.gov/wise
>
> -end-
>
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Received on Wed 02 Feb 2011 12:51:41 PM PST