NASA’s NEOWISE infrared legacy will live on – NASA

NASA’s NEOWISE near-Earth object hunting mission is nearing completion. But her work will continue with NASA’s next-generation infrared mission: NEO Surveyor.

After more than 14 successful years in space, NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission will end on July 31. But as the mission draws to a close, another is taking shape, leveraging the experience gained by NEOWISE: NASA’s NEO Surveyor (Near Earth Object Surveyor), the first purpose-built infrared space telescope, dedicated to hunting dangerous near-Earth objects. Set to launch in late 2027, it is a major step forward in the agency’s planetary defense strategy.

“Having developed new techniques to find and characterize near-Earth objects hidden in its massive infrared survey data, NEOWISE has become key to helping us develop and operate the next-generation space telescope future of NASA. It’s a precursor mission,” said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator and NEO Surveyor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “NEO Surveyor will look for the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that could cause significant damage to Earth if we don’t find them first.”

The end of NEOWISE’s mission is related to the Sun. About every 11 years, our star experiences a cycle of increased activity that peaks during a period called solar maximum. Explosive events, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, become more frequent and heat our planet’s atmosphere, causing it to expand. Atmospheric gases, in turn, increase the drag of satellites orbiting the Earth, slowing them down. With the Sun currently growing to its predicted maximum levels of activity and with no propulsion system for NEOWISE to keep itself in orbit, the spacecraft will soon fall too low to be usable.

The infrared telescope is going out of business by exceeding science targets for not one, but two missions, starting as WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer).

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, WISE launched in December 2009 on a six-month mission to scan the entire infrared sky. By July 2010, WISE had achieved this with far greater sensitivity than previous surveys, and NASA extended the mission until 2011.

During this phase, WISE studied distant galaxies, outgassing comets, exploding white dwarf stars, and brown dwarfs. It identified tens of millions of actively feeding supermassive black holes. It also generated data on circumstellar disks – clouds of gas, dust and debris orbiting stars – that citizen scientists continue to mine through the Disk Detective project.

In addition, he excelled in finding main-belt asteroids as well as near-Earth objects and discovered the first known Trojan asteroid of Earth. Additionally, the mission provided a record of dark and faint near-Earth objects that are difficult to detect by ground-based telescopes, revealing that these objects make up a significant portion of the near-Earth object population.

Invisible to the naked eye, infrared wavelengths are emitted by warm objects. To keep the heat generated by WISE itself from interfering with its infrared observations, the spacecraft relied on cryogenic cooling. By the time the coolant ran out, WISE had mapped the sky twice, and NASA put the spacecraft into hibernation in February 2011.

Shortly thereafter, Mainzer and her team proposed a new mission for the spacecraft: to search for, track, and characterize near-Earth objects that generate a strong infrared signal from their heating by the Sun.

“Without a coolant, we had to find a way to cool the spacecraft enough to measure infrared signals from asteroids,” said Joseph Masiero, NEOWISE’s deputy principal investigator and a scientist at IPAC, a research organization at Caltech in Pasadena. , California. “By ordering the telescope to look into deep space for several months, we determined that it would radiate just enough heat to reach the lowest temperatures that would still allow us to obtain high-quality data.” NASA reactivated the mission in 2013 under the Near-Earth Object Observations Program, a precursor to the agency’s current planetary defense program, renamed NEOWISE.

Repeatedly surveying the sky from low Earth orbit, NEOWISE has made 1.45 million infrared measurements of over 44,000 solar system objects to date. This includes more than 3,000 NEOs, 215 of which were detected by the space telescope. Twenty-five of them are comets, among them the famous comet NEOWISE that was visible in the night sky in the summer of 2020.

“The spacecraft has exceeded all expectations and provided vast amounts of data that the science community will use for decades to come,” said Joseph Hunt, NEOWISE project manager at JPL. “Scientists and engineers who have worked on WISE and through NEOWISE have also built a knowledge base that will help inform future infrared survey missions.”

The space telescope will continue its survey until July 31. Then, on August 8, mission controllers at JPL will send a command that puts NEOWISE into hibernation for the last time. Since its launch, NEOWISE’s orbit has been drawing closer to Earth. NEOWISE is expected to burn up in our planet’s atmosphere sometime between late 2024 and early 2025.

NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor support the objectives of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act directed NASA to detect and characterize at least 90% of near-Earth objects more than 140 meters (460 feet) across that are within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of the orbit of our planet. Objects of this size can cause significant regional damage, or worse, if they impact Earth.

JPL manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for PDCO within the Science Mission Directorate. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Processing, archiving, and dissemination of scientific data is done at IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about NEOWISE, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/neowise

Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov

2024-094