Wide field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE) Spacecraft

On December 14, 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft.  From a vantage points 500 km above Earth’s surface, WISE surveyed the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, creating a cosmic clearinghouse of hundreds of millions of objects that will be catalogued and provide a vast storehouse of knowledge about the solar system, the Milky Way, and the universe.  By the end of its six-month mission, WISE acquired nearly 1,500,000 images covering the entire sky.  The mission has uncovered objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, near-Earth asteroids, and comets.  Its vast catalogs will be studied for years to come to help answer fundamental questions about the origins of planets, stars and galaxies, and provide a feast of data for astronomers to analyze for decades to come.  WISE data will also reveal new information about the composition of near-Earth objects and asteroids – are they fluffy like snow or hard like rocks, or both?  WISE is an Astrophysics Division mission.
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