Infrared Hunt Begins: WISE Starts All-Sky Survey

Infrared Hunt Begins: WISE Starts All-Sky Survey
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 14, 2010
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2447

NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) began its survey of
the infrared sky today. The mission will spend nine months scanning the
sky one-and-a-half times in infrared light, revealing all sorts of
cosmic characters -- everything from near-Earth asteroids to young
galaxies more than ten billion light-years away.

WISE, which launched Dec. 14, 2009, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in
California, will uncover hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and
hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Its vast catalog of data
will provide astronomers and other missions with data for mine for
decades to come.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey
Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The
principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was
competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was
built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft
was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science
operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at
http://www.nasa.gov/wise

, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu

and
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise

.

2010-013