* Astronomy

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RE: WISE Satellite

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NASA recycles hibernating spacecraft to hunt for asteroids and near-Earth objects

A hibernating NASA spacecraft has been called back into service to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects and search asteroids that astronauts could explore.

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NASA's WISE Survey Uncovers Millions of Black Holes

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies.
Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These powerful galaxies, which burn brightly with infrared light, are nicknamed hot DOGs.
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NASA'S WISE Scientists to Discuss Black Holes and Extreme Objects

NASA will host a news teleconference at 17:00 UT, Wednesday, Aug. 29, to announce new discoveries from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The discoveries are related to the distant universe, including supermassive black holes and rare galaxies.
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NASA Space Telescope Finds Fewer Asteroids Near Earth

New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought. The findings also indicate NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids, meeting a goal agreed to with Congress in 1998.
Astronomers now estimate there are roughly 19,500 -- not 35,000 -- mid-size near-Earth asteroids. Scientists say this improved understanding of the population may indicate the hazard to Earth could be somewhat less than previously thought. However, the majority of these mid-size asteroids remain to be discovered. More research also is needed to determine if fewer mid-size objects (between 100 and 1000-metre wide) also mean fewer potentially hazardous asteroids, those that come closest to Earth.
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NASA's WISE Mission Offers a Taste of Galaxies to Come

An assorted mix of colourful galaxies is being released today by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, or WISE. The nine galaxies are a taste of what's to come. The mission plans to release similar images for the 1,000 largest galaxies that appear in our sky, and possibly more.
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WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.
So far, the WISE mission has released dozens of colourful images of the cosmos, in which infrared light has been assigned colours we see with our eyes. The whole collection can be seen at wise.ssl.berkeley.edu.
The public archive for astronomers is online at wise2.ipac.caltech.edu. Instructions for astronomy enthusiasts wanting to try their hand at using the archive are at wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/wise_image_service.html.
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A WISE eye on the sky signs off - February 18, 2011

Old satellites never die; they just get decommissioned. At least that was the fate of NASAs Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), when project officials turned off the telescopes transmitter on 17 February. WISE had already completed its principal mission of recording the entire night sky in infrared wavelengths back in October and, after an extended mission to catalogue near-Earth asteroids, was placed in hibernation mode at the beginning of February.
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Can WISE Find the Hypothetical 'Tyche'?

In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" -- a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name "Tyche" for the hypothetical planet. Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
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WISE space telescope