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Space Topics

WISE


The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is an astronomy mission that will perform a survey of the entire sky in four infrared wavelengths. WISE is similar to past all-sky survey missions such as COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer, whose DIRBE instrument imaged the whole sky in near-infrared wavelengths) and IRAS (the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which imaged the whole sky in mid-infrared wavelengths). However, WISE has hundreds of times the sensitivity of IRAS, and 500,000 tiems the sensitivity of COBE DIRBE.

WISE will find millions of objects too dim to have been discovered before. The combination of WISE's great sensitivity, the choice of infrared wavelengths, and the fact that they obtain overlapping coverage of the same spot in the sky eight times in quick succession means that the mission will be able to detect hundreds of thousands of asteroids and measure their diameters very accurately, much more accurately than is possible with optical observations. They will also perform the first complete survey of solitary brown dwarfs in the region of space near our Sun. In fact, if there are stray Jupiters or even Neptunes wandering around particularly nearby, WISE will find them.

Mission facts

Launch date: December 14, 2009
Expected mission length: 10 months (1 month checkout plus 9 months mission for 1.5 complete sky surveys)
Orbit: Polar, sun-synchronous, 95-minute orbit at 525 kilometers altitude