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. |