WISE satellite to look for darkest objects in universe
By William Atkins
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 21:57
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The WISE satellite, short for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite, has a launch window of between 12:09 p.m. and 12:23 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), from its launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
A Delta II rocket will launch WISE into a 525-kilometer (326-mile) circular, polar orbit for its seven-month mission in space.
According to the NASA media brief NASA’s WISE sky surveying spacecraft read for launch Dec. 11, the satellite will “… scan the entire sky in infrared light with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than ever before, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images."
"The mission will uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.”
The images taken by WISE will be gathered into a catalog that will include some of the darkest and dimmest objects in the universe. Such objects include dwarf stars, asteroids, dust clouds, brown dwarf stars, and asteroids.
According to the 9/15/2009 NASA article In Search of Dark Asteroids (and Other Sneaky Things), “The full-sky infrared map produced by WISE will reveal even these darker asteroids, mapping the locations and sizes of roughly 200,000 asteroids and giving scientists a clearer idea of how many large and potentially dangerous asteroids are nearby."
"WISE will also help answer questions about the formation of stars and the evolution and structure of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.”
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