NASA's WISE Mission Arrives at Launch Site

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

News release: 2009-127 August 17, 2009

NASA's WISE Mission Arrives at Launch Site

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has
arrived at its last stop on Earth -- Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

WISE is scheduled to blast into space in December, aboard a United Launch Alliance
Delta II rocket from NASA's Space Launch Complex 2. Orbiting around Earth, it will
scan the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, unveiling hundreds of thousands of asteroids,
and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies.

The spacecraft arrived at Vandenberg along the central California coast today, after a
winding journey via truck from Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder,
Colo. Ball built the mission's spacecraft; its telescope and science instrument were built by
Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.

"WISE has arrived and is almost ready to go," said William Irace, the mission's project
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "After we check the
spacecraft out and fill the telescope cooling tanks with solid hydrogen, we'll mate it to the
rocket and launch."

WISE is an infrared space telescope like two currently orbiting missions, NASA's Spitzer
Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission
with important NASA participation. But, unlike these missions, WISE will survey the
entire sky. It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen cosmic treasures.
Millions of images from the survey will serve as rough maps for other observatories, such
as Spitzer and NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, guiding them to
intriguing targets.

"WISE will survey the cosmic landscape in the infrared so that future telescopes can
home in on the most interesting 'properties,'" said Edward Wright, the principal
investigator for the mission at UCLA.

The infrared surveyor will pick up the heat from a cornucopia of objects, both near and
far. It will find hundreds of thousands of new asteroids in our main asteroid belt, and
hundreds of near-Earth objects, which are comets and asteroids with orbits that pass
relatively close to Earth. The mission will uncover the coldest stars, called brown dwarfs,
perhaps even one closer to us than our closest known neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which
is 4 light-years away. More distant finds will include nurseries of stars, swirling planet-
building disks and the universe's most luminous galaxies billions of light-years away.

The data will help answer fundamental questions about how solar systems and galaxies
form, and will provide the astronomical community with mountains of data to mine.

"WISE will create a legacy that endures for decades," said Peter Eisenhardt, the mission's
project scientist at JPL. "Today, we still refer to the catalogue of our predecessor, the
Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which operated in 1983."

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite was a joint infrared survey mission between NASA,
the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. WISE's survey, thanks to next-generation
technology, will be hundreds of times more sensitive.

The mission will scan the sky from a sun-synchronous orbit, 500 kilometers (about 311
miles) above Earth. After a one-month checkout period, it will map the whole sky over a
period of six months. Onboard frozen hydrogen, which will cool the infrared detectors, is
expected to last several months longer, allowing WISE to map much of the sky a second
time and see what has changed.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate. The mission's 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
will take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible
for government oversight of the Delta II and launch countdown management.

More information is online at http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

-end-

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