WISE L‑20 News Conference

WISE L‑20 News Conference



NASA,WISE



NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explor­er, or Wise, is chilled out, sport­ing a sun­shade and get­ting ready to roll. NASA’s newest space­craft is sched­uled to roll to the pad on Fri­day, Nov. 20, its last stop before launch­ing into space to sur­vey the entire sky in infrared light. 

Wise is sched­uled to launch no ear­li­er than 9:09 a.m. EST on Dec. 9 from Van­den­berg Air Force Base in Cal­i­for­nia. It will cir­cle Earth over the poles, scan­ning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mis­sion will uncov­er hid­den cos­mic objects, includ­ing the coolest stars, dark aster­oids and the most lumi­nous galaxies. 

“The eyes of Wise are a vast improve­ment over those of past infrared sur­veys,” said Edward “Ned” Wright, the prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor for the mis­sion at UCLA. “We will find mil­lions of objects that have nev­er been seen before.” 

The mis­sion will map the entire sky at four infrared wave­lengths with sen­si­tiv­i­ty hun­dreds to hun­dreds of thou­sands of times greater than its pre­de­ces­sors, cat­a­loging hun­dreds of mil­lions of objects. The data will serve as nav­i­ga­tion charts for oth­er mis­sions, point­ing them to the most inter­est­ing tar­gets. NASA’s Hub­ble and Spitzer Space Tele­scopes, the Euro­pean Space Agen­cy’s Her­schel Space Obser­va­to­ry, and NASA’s upcom­ing Sofia and James Webb Space Tele­scope will fol­low up on Wise finds.



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