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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
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: 2012-072 March 14, 2012
NASA Releases New WISE Mission Catalog of Entire Infrared Sky
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-072&cid=release_2012-072
PASADENA -- NASA unveiled a new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky today showing
more than a half billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey
Explorer (WISE) mission.
"Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community," said Edward
Wright, WISE principal investigator at UCLA, who first began working on the mission with other
team members in 1998.
WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, and mapped the entire sky in 2010 with vastly better sensitivity than
its predecessors. It collected more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light,
capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies. Since then, the team has been
processing more than 15 trillion bytes of returned data. A preliminary release of WISE data,
covering the first half of the sky surveyed, was made last April.
The WISE catalog of the entire sky meets the mission's fundamental objective. The individual WISE
exposures have been combined into an atlas of more than 18,000 images covering the sky and a
catalog listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual objects found in the
images. Most of the objects are stars and galaxies, with roughly equal numbers of each. Many of
them have never been seen before.
WISE observations have led to numerous discoveries, including the elusive, coolest class of stars.
Astronomers hunted for these failed stars, called "Y-dwarfs," for more than a decade. Because they
have been cooling since their formation, they don't shine in visible light and could not be spotted
until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared vision.
WISE also took a poll of near-Earth asteroids, finding there are significantly fewer mid-size objects
than previously thought. It also determined NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest
near-Earth asteroids.
Other discoveries were unexpected. WISE found the first known "Trojan" asteroid to share the same
orbital path around the sun as Earth. One of the images released today shows a surprising view of an
"echo" of infrared light surrounding an exploded star. The echo was etched in the clouds of gas and
dust when the flash of light from the supernova explosion heated surrounding clouds. At least 100
papers on the results from the WISE survey already have been published. More discoveries are
expected now that astronomers have access to the whole sky as seen by the spacecraft.
"With the release of the all-sky catalog and atlas, WISE joins the pantheon of great sky surveys that
have led to many remarkable discoveries about the universe," said Roc Cutri, who leads the WISE
data processing and archiving effort at the Infrared and Processing Analysis Center at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It will be exciting and rewarding to see the innovative ways
the science and educational communities will use WISE in their studies now that they have the data
at their fingertips."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages and operates WISE for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under
NASA's Explorers Program, which is 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 and Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo. Science
operations, data processing and archiving take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For a collection of WISE images released to date, visit:
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html
An introduction and quick guide to accessing the WISE all-sky archive for astronomers is online at:
http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/
For more information about WISE, visit:
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