NASA's WISE Eye on the Universe Begins All-Sky Survey Mission

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673/818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2009-193 Dec. 14, 2009

NASA's WISE Eye on the Universe Begins All-Sky Survey Mission

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-193&cid=kintera_release_2009-193

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or
WISE, lifted off over the Pacific Ocean this morning on its way to map the entire sky in infrared
light.

A Delta II rocket carrying the spacecraft launched at 6:09 a.m. PST (9:09 a.m. EST) from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket deposited WISE into a polar orbit 326 miles
above Earth.

"WISE thundered overhead, lighting up the pre-dawn skies," said William Irace, the mission's project
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "All systems are looking good,
and we are on our way to seeing the entire infrared sky better than ever before."

Engineers acquired a signal from the spacecraft via NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite
System just 10 seconds after the spacecraft separated from the rocket. Approximately three minutes
later, WISE re-oriented itself with its solar panels facing the sun to generate its own power. The next
major event occurred about 17 minutes later. Valves on the cryostat, a chamber of super-cold
hydrogen ice that cools the WISE instrument, opened. Because the instrument sees the infrared, or
heat, signatures of objects, it must be kept at chilly temperatures. Its coldest detectors are less than
minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit.

"WISE needs to be colder than the objects it's observing," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the mission's
principal investigator. "Now we're ready to see the infrared glow from hundreds of thousands of
asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies."

With the spacecraft stable, cold and communicating with mission controllers at JPL, a month-long
checkout and calibration is underway.

WISE will see the infrared colors of the whole sky with sensitivity and resolution far better than the
last infrared sky survey, performed 26 years ago. The space telescope will spend nine months
scanning the sky once, then one-half the sky a second time. The primary mission will end when
WISE's frozen hydrogen runs out, about 10 months after launch.

Just about everything in the universe glows in infrared, which means the mission will catalog a
variety of astronomical targets. Near-Earth asteroids, stars, planet-forming disks and distant galaxies
all will be easy for the mission to see. Hundreds of millions of objects will populate the WISE atlas,
providing astronomers and other space missions, such as NASA's planned James Webb Space
Telescope, with a long-lasting infrared roadmap.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The mission was competitively selected under the Explorers Program, managed by
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the
Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace &
Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
NASA's Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., managed the payload
integration and the launch service.

More information about the WISE mission is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/wise,
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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