Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer{WISE}images released

ynotdu

Launched in December 2009,WISE is a cheap but cheerful craft with a lifespan of just nine months.Its mission is to survey the Sky in infrared one and a half times befoe its coolant runs out.

at last some news on it,It started sending back data on just Jan 14th 2010,since then it has sent back a quater of a million images!

NASA have just released some really spectaculor images converted from infrared to the wavelenghts the human eye can see.They are Awesome!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html

more info here on WISE here if it interests You!:)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/news/wise20100217.html

ynotdu

Image is of the heart and soul Nebulae located 6000 light years away from Earth in the Constellation of Cassiopea.It is a hive of new star creation located at parts of the Perseus spiral arm of the Milky way Galaxy.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/457046main_wise20100524-full.jpg

BULLER

Beautiful, the Andromeda pics are fantastic!!
Thanks!

ynotdu

With only enough coolant left to keep wise's cameras operating working for two more months.This link has much information news and images.It has already mapped the Sky once and is well into its planned 2nd half mapping.It has exceeded even NASA's wildest dreams in the amount of unpreviously known Asteroids,Comets etc it has found.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html

image gallery here

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/latest-images_archive_1.html

djhaxman

25,000 new asteroids found, as well as some comets and 20 confirmed brown dwarfs, this mission is living up to it's expectations.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/16/new-asteroids-nasas-sky-mapping-scope/?

LOS ANGELES -- Worried about Earth-threatening asteroids? One of NASA's newest space telescopes has spotted 25,000 never-before-seen asteroids in just six months.

Ninety-five of those are considered "near Earth," but in the language of astronomy that means within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers). Luckily for us, none poses any threat to Earth anytime soon.

Called WISE for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the telescope completes its first full scan of the sky on Saturday and then begins another round of imaging.

What's special about the WISE project is its ability to see through impenetrable veils of dust, picking up the heat glow of objects that are invisible to regular telescopes.

"Most telescopes focus on the hottest and brightest objects in the universe," said Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "WISE is especially sensitive to seeing what's cool and dark, what you could call the stealth objects of the universe."

Mission team members are elated with the discoveries of the $320 million (euro250 million) project, which launched in December. By the end of the year, researchers expect to have a cosmic census of millions of newfound objects that should help answer questions about how planets, stars and galaxies form.

Besides all those asteroids, WISE has also sighted 15 new comets. It has spied hundreds of potential brown dwarfs -- stellar objects that are bigger than a planet but much smaller than a star -- and confirmed the existence of 20 of them, including some of the coldest ever known.

The telescope also detected what's thought to be an ultraluminous galaxy, more than 10 billion light years away and formed from other colliding galaxies.

"We're filling in the blanks on everything in the universe from near-Earth objects to forming galaxies," said project scientist Peter Eisenhardt of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the mission. "There's quite a zoo."

WISE's 16-inch telescope was built by Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory. It circles the Earth 300 miles high and takes snapshots every 11 seconds over the whole sky.

Since the sky survey began, the JPL team has reported the new near-Earth objects to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which keeps track of all small solar system objects.

WISE is discovering near-Earth asteroids that are on average larger than what's found by existing telescopes, which should help scientists better calculate their potential threat, said Harvard astronomer Timothy Spahr, who directs the Minor Planet Center.

The WISE mission comes a quarter century after the Infrared Astronomy Satellite made the first all-sky map in infrared wavelength in 1983. Unlike its predecessor, WISE is far more powerful. It's expected to keep taking images covering half of the sky until October when it will begin to run out of coolant.

NASA has released a picture a week of WISE's myriad finds. But the full celestial catalog of what's out there will not be released to the public until next year after the team has had time to process the images and flag false alarms.

"The real discoveries will come when we let the whole world in on the data," Eisenhardt said.

ynotdu

Cheers for that dj! had nearly forgotten about it.Latest news on it is they now calculate that they have enough coolant left until November and requested that the mission continue using the two of the four 'camera's' that don't require coolant to complete a full second sweep.Funding was refused!:(
They really are getting these crafts right ar'nt they.
add this to Plancks first all sky survey and Rosetta's images of Asteroid Luetetia,sure we're spoilt rotten!:)

whynotdo

Wise is now neowise,despite conflicting reports since its launch last Year its coolant finally ran out September but JPL found the money somewhere to keep it going with the two cameras that don't require coolant at least for now.

WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, from Vandenberg Air Force Station in California aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. Its 40-centimeter (16-inch) infrared telescope scans the skies from an Earth-circling orbit crossing the poles. It has already snapped more than 1.8 million pictures at four infrared wavelengths. Currently, the survey has covered the sky about one-and-one-half times, producing a vast catalogue containing hundreds of millions of objects, from near-Earth asteroids to cool stars called "brown dwarfs," to distant, luminous galaxies.


To date, WISE has discovered 19 comets and more than 33,500 asteroids, including 120 near-Earth objects, which are those bodies with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth's path around the sun. More discoveries regarding objects outside our solar system, such as the brown dwarfs and luminous galaxies, are expected.

"The science data collected by WISE will be used by the scientific community for decades," said Jaya Bajpayee, the WISE program executive in the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "It will also provide a sky map for future observatories like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope."

The NEOWISE Post-Cryogenic Mission is designed to complete the survey of the solar system and finish the second survey of the rest of the sky at its new warmer temperature of about minus 203 degrees Celsius (minus 334 degrees Fahrenheit) using its two shortest-wavelength detectors. The survey extension will last one to four months, depending on early results.

NEOWISE will also keep observing other targets, such as the closest brown dwarfs to the sun. In addition, data from the second sky scan will help identify objects that have moved in the sky since they were first detected by WISE. This allows astronomers to pick out the brown dwarfs closest to our sun. The closer the object is, the more it will appear to move from our point of view.

The WISE science team now is analyzing millions of objects captured in the images, including many never seen before. A first batch of WISE data, covering more than half the sky, will be released to the astronomical community in spring 2011, with the rest to follow about one year later.

Its spectacular image gallery at this link:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/gallery-index.html

Stargate

ynotdu wrote: »

With only enough coolant left to keep wise's cameras operating working for two more months.This link has much information news and images.It has already mapped the Sky once and is well into its planned 2nd half mapping.It has exceeded even NASA's wildest dreams in the amount of unpreviously known Asteroids,Comets etc it has found.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html

image gallery here

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/latest-images_archive_1.html

Really enjoyed those ynotdu Tnx !!

whynotdo

Stargate wrote: »

Really enjoyed those ynotdu Tnx !!

Cool SG,they are something else for sure, i mean We just take so much of what these lesser publicised flights are achieving..............

BTW i have resisted the temptation so far but do You Know I can thank every post ynotdu ever made now that i am whynotdo.................. if You spot it happening You will realise i am feeling unappreciated in life,the Universe and everything!:cool:

djhaxman

Digging up an old thread but the WISE mission has now come to an end, but here's a few of the best images from this very successful operation

http://www.universetoday.com/83227/gallery-wises-greatest-hits/?