NASA Mission Concludes After Years Of Successful Asteroid Detections
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Engineers on NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission commanded the spacecraft to turn its transmitter off for the last time Thursday. This concludes more than 10 years of its planetary defense mission to search for asteroids and comets, including those that could pose a threat to Earth.
[...] NASA ended the mission because NEOWISE will soon drop too low in its orbit around Earth to provide usable science data. An uptick in solar activity is heating the upper atmosphere, causing it to expand and create drag on the spacecraft, which does not have a propulsion system to keep it in orbit. Now decommissioned, NEOWISE is expected to safely burn up in our planet's atmosphere in late 2024.
During its operational lifetime, the infrared survey telescope exceeded scientific objectives for not one but two missions, starting with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. Managed by JPL, WISE launched in December 2009 with a seven-month mission to scan the entire infrared sky.
By July 2010, WISE had accomplished this with far greater sensitivity than previous surveys. A few months later, the telescope ran out of the coolant that kept heat produced by the spacecraft from interfering with its infrared observations. (Invisible to the human eye, infrared wavelengths are associated with heat.)
NASA extended the mission under the name NEOWISE until February 2011 to complete a survey of the main belt asteroids, at which point the spacecraft was put into hibernation.
Analysis of this data showed that although the lack of coolant meant the space telescope could no longer observe the faintest infrared objects in the universe, it could still make precise observations of asteroids and comets that generate a strong infrared signal from being heated by the sun as they travel past our planet.
NASA brought the telescope out of hibernation in 2013 under the Near-Earth Object Observations Program, a precursor for the agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, to continue the NEOWISE survey of asteroids and comets in the pursuit of planetary defense.
[...] "The NEOWISE mission has provided a unique, long-duration data set of the infrared sky that will be used by scientists for decades to come," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for both NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "But its additional legacy is that it has helped lay the groundwork for NASA's next planetary defense infrared space telescope."
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