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.

On January 5, 2010, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope's new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), broke the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before.   The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe. This makes Hubble a powerful “time machine” that allows astronomers to see the most distant galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years from the Big Bang.  The existence of these newly found galaxies push back the time when galaxies began to form. The deep observations also demonstrates the progressive build up of galaxies and provides further support for the hierarchical model of galaxy assembly where small objects accrete mass, or merge, to form bigger objects over a smooth and steady but dramatic process of collision and agglomeration.  This is analogous to streams merging into tributaries and then into a bay.  Hubble Space Telescope is an Astrophysics Division mission.