NASA to launch infrared survey explorer in December
NASA will launch the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) into
space in December, the US space agency said Monday.
Orbiting around Earth, WISE will scan the entire sky at infrared
wavelengths, unveiling hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds
of millions of stars and galaxies, according to NASA.
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Artist’s concept of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. A new
NASA mission will scan the entire sky in infrared light in
search of nearby cool stars, planetary construction zones and
the brightest galaxies in the universe. Called the Wide-field
Infrared Survey Explorer, the mission has been approved to
proceed into the preliminary design phase as the next in NASA’s
Medium-class Explorer program of lower cost, highly focused,
rapid-development scientific spacecraft. It is scheduled to
launch in 2008. NASA/JPL |
WISE is an infrared space telescope like two currently orbiting
missions, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space
Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA
participation. But, unlike these missions, WISE will survey the entire
sky.
It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen cosmic
treasures. Millions of images from the survey will serve as rough maps
for other observatories, such as Spitzer and NASA's upcoming James Webb
Space Telescope, guiding them to intriguing targets.
"WISE will survey the cosmic landscape in the infrared so that future
telescopes can home in on the most interesting 'properties'", said
Edward Wright, the principal investigator for the mission at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
The infrared surveyor will pick up the heat from a cornucopia of
objects, both near and far. It will find hundreds of thousands of new
asteroids in our main asteroid belt, and hundreds of near-Earth objects,
which are comets and asteroids with orbits that pass relatively close to
Earth.
The mission will uncover the coldest stars, called brown dwarfs,
perhaps even one closer to us than our closest known neighbor, Proxima
Centauri, which is 4 light-years away. More distant finds will include
nurseries of stars, swirling planet-building disks and the universe's
most luminous galaxies billions of light-years away.
The data will help answer fundamental questions about how solar
systems and galaxies form, and will provide the astronomical community
with mountains of data to mine.
"WISE will create a legacy that endures for decades", said Peter
Eisenhardt, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. "Today, we still refer to the catalogue of our predecessor,
the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which operated in 1983".
The Infrared Astronomical Satellite was a joint infrared survey
mission between NASA, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. WISE's
survey, thanks to next-generation technology, will be hundreds of times
more sensitive.
Xinhua |
