WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

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

Feature: 2011-117 April 14, 2011

WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-117&cid=release_2011-117

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.

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