New NASA Sky Mapper to Hunt Stars, Galaxies, Near-Earth Asteroids

[n2doc]

By Ron Cowen, Science News



Veteran astronomer Ned Wright is already considered pretty smart. But soon he’ll be getting wise.

That’s WISE as in Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the NASA spacecraft set for launch on December 11 that will provide the most comprehensive examination of the sky ever recorded in infrared radiation. Wright, of the University of California, Los Angeles, leads the $320 million robotic mission, which for at least nine months will map the sky in four bands of infrared wavelengths. These wavelengths, ranging from 3.3 micrometers to 23 micrometers, are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and can’t be seen from the ground.

The mission is expected to catalog hundreds of millions of infrared-emitting bodies, including hundreds of dim, previously unknown asteroids and comets that cross Earth’s orbit. WISE will also give a detailed census of thousands of failed stars, called brown dwarfs, and millions of distant galaxies that glow unusually brightly at infrared wavelengths.

WISE is expected to dramatically boost the number of known debris disks—composed of pulverized rocky remnants of planet formation—around young stars and to turn up more of the dusty cocoons that serve as birth sites for stars. Dust will be easily detected because it absorbs the visible and ultraviolet light from these hatchlings and reradiates the light in the infrared.



http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/new-nasa-sky-mapper-to-hunt-stars-galaxies-near-earth-asteroids/

[tabatha]

1. Neat. Thanks for link.

[pokerfan]

2. It's 'WISE' to hunt for Earth crossing asteroids