ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2010) — NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) began its survey of the infrared sky Jan. 14, 2010. The mission will spend nine months scanning the sky one-and-a-half times in infrared light, revealing all sorts of cosmic characters -- everything from near-Earth asteroids to young galaxies more than ten billion light-years away.

WISE, which launched Dec. 14, 2009, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will uncover hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Its vast catalog of data will provide astronomers and other missions with data for mine for decades to come.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages 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, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

enlarge

This artist's conception shows NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mapping the whole sky in infrared. The mission will unveil hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. (Credit: Ball/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Related Stories

NASA's WISE Mission Completes Extensive Sky Survey (July 19, 2010) — NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, completed its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, 2010. The mission has generated more than one million images so far, of everything from ...  > read more

NASA's WISE Eye On the Universe Begins All-Sky Survey Mission (Dec. 14, 2009) — NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, lifted off over the Pacific Ocean Dec. 14 on its way to map the entire sky in infrared light. WISE will see the infrared colors of the whole sky ...  > read more

WISE Spacecraft Warming Up (Aug. 11, 2010) — NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is warming up. Team members say the spacecraft is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep its heat-sensitive instrument ...  > read more

NASA's WISE Space Telescope Jettisons Its Cover (Jan. 2, 2010) — NASA's recently launched Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) opened its eyes to the starry sky Dec. 29, after ejecting its protective cover. Engineers and scientists say the maneuver went off ...  > read more

Search ScienceDaily