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NASA's Infrared Survey Telescope Ready to Retire
NEOWISE's enduring infrared eyes, which faithfully scanned the entire sky a whopping 23 times and observed more than 190,000 solar system objects, have closed for good.
Nearly 15 years ago, a relatively small spacecraft about the size of a polar bear launched into space with a big mission: to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths with a sensitivity up to hundreds of thousands of times better than previous surveys. The NASA mission, called WISE(Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), far exceeded expectations, scanning the skies not once but twice and leaving behind a massive trove of data covering more than 740 million asteroids, stars, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. "When I first started working on the original WISE mission in 2003, it was clear that it would teach us a lot about asteroids and comets, but it wouldn't be able to see huge numbers of Earth-approaching near-Earth objects," says Amy Mainzer, a professor at UCLA and the principal investigator of both NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor.
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