Monday, February 21, 2011

WISE Mission Ends

NASA recently ended the mission of its WISE-- Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer-- spacecraft. Its planned mission ended last September, but it has been on an extended mission. The primary purpose of WISE was to conduct an infrared survey of the entire sky. In fact, it surveyed the sky one and a half times and was on its way to completing the second circuit when NASA pulled the plug for budgetary reasons.

Besides completing the all-sky survey and revealing some things in infrared that are not accessible in the visible spectrum, WISE also did work in the Solar System, discovering 19 comets and 33,500 asteroids. Of those asteroids, 120 are near-Earth objects.

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