NASA's new Wise "eye" launches in new search of heavens

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Washington - NASA's newest 'eye' was launched Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after several days of weather-mandated delays.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is equipped with unprecedented infrared sensitivity to scope out cosmic objects unseen by other cameras.

Over the next nine months in orbit around the north and south poles, the satellite is to scan the entire sky one and a half times seeking out the 'coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies,' NASA said.

NASA's director of astrophysics Jon Morse calls it 'the infrared motherlode that scientists will mine for years to come.'

What sets this 'eye' apart from other space cameras such as the Hubble telescope and deep-space probes is its ability to read four infrared wavelengths 'with sensitivity hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times greater than its predecessors,' NASA's Pasadena- based Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

The resulting pictures will serve as navigation charts for the big space cameras like the Hubble, NASA's Spitzer space telescope, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and NASA's upcoming Sofia and James Webb Space Telescope.

'With infrared, we can find the dark asteroids other surveys have missed and learn about the whole population. Are they mostly big, small, fluffy or hard?' asked Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Brown dwarfs, as failed stars are known, or cool stars, could possibly be lurking 'right under our noses,' NASA said, perhaps nearer than Proxima Centauri, the nearest known star to Earth's own solar system.

To keep WISE sensitive to infrared light, it cannot give out any infrared rays of its own, so its detectors are to be chilled to ultra-cold temperatures - below 8 degrees Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.

'Wise is chilled out,' project manager William Irace said.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/sc...#ixzz0bu6KHBLq

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This infrared snapshot of a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way was taken shortly after NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) ejected its cover. The "first-light" picture shows thousands of stars and covers an area three times the size of the moon. WISE will take more than a million similar pictures covering the whole sky.

The image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction, in order to help calibrate its pointing system. The mission's survey will be done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the motion to create freeze-frame images. The team is working now to match the motions of the spacecraft and the scan mirror precisely.

This eight-second exposure shows infrared light from three of WISE's four wavelength bands: Blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WI...e20100106.html

[Hootmon]

Waiting for the 'waste of money' posts to commence...

[John 3:16]

Waiting for the 'waste of money' posts to commence...

it's a waste of money

[Amber Lynne]

While it is neat to see, I can't help but think that YES the money could be better spent here on earth. Sorry, Hoot.