* Astronomy

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RE: WISE Satellite

Blobrana · L

The countdown clock is ticking, with just days to go before the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, rockets into space on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light.
NASA's newest spacecraft is currently perched atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, California. It is scheduled to roar into space at dawn on Dec. 11, at 6:09:33 a.m. PST (9:09:33 a.m. EST), on a short journey to its final Earth-circling orbit 525 kilometres overhead.

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WISE mission science briefing

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WISE Prelaunch News Conference

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Blobrana · L

The launch of the WISE mission has been re-scheduled the 11th December, 2009.

Blobrana · L

An unmanned NASA satellite will soon survey the entire sky to discover millions of uncharted stars and galaxies, asteroids, and planetary "construction zones," providing valuable new information on our solar system, the Milky Way and the universe.
NASA'S Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), scheduled to launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Dec. 9 or shortly after, will map the sky at four infrared wavelengths - invisible to the unaided human eye - with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than its predecessors. WISE will catalogue hundreds of millions of objects.
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Somewhere out in space are thousands of asteroids, some of them potentially hazardous to Earth, that are so dark they have escaped detection by telescopes.
They may not be able to hide much longer.
Later this month, a satellite the size of a race car is scheduled to launch and begin orbiting the Earth 325 miles above the surface.
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WISE Snug in Its Nose Cone

NASAs Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has been wrapped in the outer nose cone, or "fairing," that will protect it during its scheduled Dec. 9 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
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A new NASA space telescope could reveal our hidden stellar neighbours, as well as previously invisible asteroids or a distant, giant planet circling our own Sun.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), launched last week, will use infrared emissions to map the entire night sky.
Because the telescope is itself cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, it will be able to spot cooler, more distant objects than any similar projects in the past, as it will not give off any detectable infrared light itself.
Scientists hope that it will allow them to spot small, cold stars, called brown dwarfs, in our region of the galaxy, some of which are suspected to be even closer than our nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away.
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Blobrana · L

NASA has agreed that acronyms should be capitalised.
So the WISE satellite is not written as the Wise Satellite.

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