The NEOWISE spacecraft viewed comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) for a second time on January 30, 2015, as the comet passed through the closest point to our sun along its 14,000-year orbit, at a solar distance of 120 million miles (193 million kilometers).
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Millions of images
of celestial objects, including asteroids, observed by NASA's
Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft now
are available online to the public. The data was collected following the
restart of the asteroid-seeking spacecraft in December 2013 after a
lengthy hibernation.
The collection of millions of infrared images and billions of
infrared measurements of asteroids, stars, galaxies and quasars spans
data obtained between December 13, 2013, and December 13, 2014.
"One of the most satisfying things about releasing these cutting-edge
astronomical data to the public is seeing what other exciting and
creative projects the scientific community does with them," said Amy
Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.
In the first year of the survey, NEOWISE captured 2.5 million image
sets, detecting and providing data on over 10,000 solar system objects.
The data revealed 129 new solar system objects, including 39 previously
undiscovered near-Earth objects. Each of the images also contains a
multitude of background stars, nebulae and galaxies. More than 10
billion measurements of these more distant objects are contained in the
release of the NEOWISE data.
"And we're far from finished," said Mainzer. “We're only into our
second year of additional science collection, and we've already added
another 21 new discoveries including six new near-Earth objects."
NEOWISE is a space telescope that scans the skies for asteroids and
comets. The telescope sees infrared light, which allows it to pick up
the heat signature of asteroids and obtain better estimates of their
true sizes. As a result, NEOWISE can see dark asteroids that are harder
for visible-light surveys to find. Nearly all of the NEOWISE discoveries
have been large --hundreds of yards, or meters, wide-- and very dark,
similar to printer toner. When NEOWISE's infrared data on an object is
combined with that of a visible-light optical telescope, it helps
scientists understand the object's composition.
NEOWISE always looks in the dawn and twilight skies – the direction
perpendicular to a line between Earth and the sun. This unique vantage
point makes it possible for NEOWISE to spot objects that approach Earth
from the direction of the sun, unlike ground-based telescopes that are
only able to view the night sky.
Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the
spacecraft was placed in hibernation in 2011 after its primary mission
was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE
and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's efforts to identify the
population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects and help
characterize previously known asteroids and comets to provide
information about their sizes and compositions.
NASA
Wednesday
announced more details in its plan for its Asteroid Redirect Mission
(ARM), which in the mid-2020s will test a number of new capabilities
needed for future human expeditions to deep space, including to
Mars.For ARM, a robotic spacecraft will capture a boulder from the
surface of a near-Earth asteroid and move it into a stable orbit around
the moon for exploration by astronauts, all in support of advancing the
nation’s journey to Mars. The agency plans to announce the specific
asteroid selected for the mission no earlier than 2019, approximately a
year before launching the robotic spacecraft.
NASA also announced it has increased the detection of near-Earth
Asteroids by 65 percent since launching its asteroid initiative three
years ago.
"NEOWISE is a vital asset in NASA’s program to find objects that
truly represent an impact hazard to Earth," said Lindley Johnson,
program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "The data reveals how far we’ve come to
understand the danger to Earth but it will still take a concerted effort
to find all of them that could do serious damage.”
In 2012, the president's NASA budget included, and Congress
authorized, $20.4 million for an expanded NASA Near-Earth Object (NEO)
Observations Program, increasing the resources for this critical program
from the $4 million per year it had received since the 1990s. The
program was again expanded in fiscal year 2014, with a budget of $40.5
million. NASA is asking Congress for $50 million for this important work
in the 2016 budget.
JPL manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah,
built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data
processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL
for NASA.
To view the NEOWISE data, visit:
http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/
docs/release/neowise/