!: First Images From WISE - The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

First Images From WISE - The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

First Pictures From WISE Spacecraft - The NASA/JPL Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. --- Please subscribe to: • www.YouTube.com • www.YouTube.com --- The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will scan the entire sky in infrared light, 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. Its vast catalogs will help answer fundamental questions about the origins of planets, stars and galaxies, and provide a feast of data for astronomers to munch on for decades to come. Thanks to next-generation technology, WISE's sensitivity is hundreds of times greater than its predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which operated in 1983. WISE will join two other infrared missions in space -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation. WISE is different from these missions in that it will survey the entire sky. It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen cosmic treasures, including rare oddities. The closest of WISE's finds will be near-Earth objects, both asteroids and comets, with orbits that come close to crossing Earth's path. The mission is expected to find hundreds of these bodies, and hundreds of thousands of additional asteroids in our solar ...