New NASA Sky Mapper Heads to Launch Pad

WASHINGTON ? NASA's new asteroid-hunting spacecraft will roll out to the pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., Friday in preparation for launch next month.

The spacecraft is due to launch Dec. 9 aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket.

Known as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the spacecraft will spend the next 10 months circling the Earth over the poles, scanning the complete sky at infrared wavelengths to uncover hidden cosmic objects, including cool stars, dark asteroids and luminous galaxies.

"You can kind of think of it as the Google Map of the universe," said Amy Mainzer, NASA?s deputy project scientist for WISE, explaining that the instrument will take repeated exposures of the same swath of sky, creating overlapping images as the telescope progresses through its sky scan. The stars and galaxies will appear fixed on the sky in each exposure, but asteroids will move over short amounts of time.

"WISE is going to be finding about 100,000 new asteroids in the main asteroid belt," Mainzer said during a Nov. 17 news conference at NASA headquarters here. "And we expect it?s going to find several hundred new asteroids that get close to Earth orbits. These are asteroids and comets whose orbits take them close to Earth?s orbit."

The $320 million project, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Boulder, Colo.-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

WISE principal investigator Edward "Ned" Wright of the University of So uthern California, Los Angeles, said the instrument will provide a vast improvement over past infrared sky surveys.

"We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before," he said during the news conference.

In addition to near Earth objects, WISE will find cool stars, known as brown dwarfs, which glow feebly like chunks of heated coal. By studying brown dwarfs, astronomers can learn more about star formation, as well as the atmospheres of planets orbiting stars beyond the sun.

"WISE is going to survey the whole sky and find these nearest neighbors and transform our view of the solar neighborhood," said Peter Eisenhardt, WISE project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's possible that one of these nearby brown dwarfs is even closer to the sun than any star that we now know of."

The mission also will spot dusty nests of stars, swirling planet-forming disks and evolving galaxies.

"WISE has been designed so that it can detect these cataclysmic dusty forming galaxies out to a distance of 10 billion light years over the entire sky," said Eisenhardt. "So we're going to find the most super-duper, hyper-ultra luminous forming galaxies in the universe, and we'll see just how extreme this galaxy forming process can get."

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 a navigation chart of sorts 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.

"This is an exciting time for space telescopes," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA headquarters here. "Many of the telescopes will work together, each contributing different pieces to some of the most intriguing puzzles in our universe."

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