Infrared Telescope’s Final Days

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Top 10 Deep-Space Photos From Infrared Telescope’s Final Days
By Lisa Grossman October 5, 2010 | 5:08 pm | Categories: Space

Oh WISE, we hardly knew you. After less than a year of sending us stunning infrared views, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ran out of the frozen hydrogen that kept it cool enough to peer through the dusty clouds of deep space.

WISE is far from finished, however. NASA announced in a press release Oct. 4 that two out of four of the orbiting observatory's detectors still work, even at warmer temperatures. The telescope will soldier on as NEOWISE, hunting for Near-Earth Objects (or NEOs) like asteroids and comets. The extended mission will get a one-month trial run, and if that goes well, it will keep observing until the end of January.

Despite its small size -- you could fit the telescope under your arm like a large purse -- and short mission, WISE has already scanned the whole sky one and a half times. As of yesterday, it had observed 153,726 solar system objects, Amanda Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting.



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