Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), U.S. satellite that observed astronomical objects at infrared wavelengths. It was launched on December 14, 2009, by a Delta II launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, into a polar orbit 500 km (310 miles) above Earth. WISE contained a 40-cm (16-inch) telescope that surveyed the entire sky at wavelengths of 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 microns (1 micron is 10−6 metre) from January to August 2010. After the solid hydrogen that kept WISE’s detectors cool was exhausted, WISE was still able to use the 3.4- and 4.6-micron detectors to survey the main asteroid belt and search for near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids whose orbits cross that of Earth. The WISE mission ended on February 17, 2011. WISE was much more sensitive than previous satellites (such as the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite) that carried out infrared sky surveys. The WISE survey gathered enough data to catalog hundreds of millions of objects.
WISE made several important discoveries because of its sensitivity at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. It discovered the first Trojan asteroid of Earth. It discovered over 33,000 asteroids, of which more than 130 were NEOs. WISE also found that there were many fewer NEOs between 100 metres and 1 km (330 and 3,300 feet) across than had been previously expected. WISE also allowed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to meet a goal set by the U.S. Congress of finding 90 percent of the NEOs larger than 1 km (3,300 feet) across. Data from WISE allowed astronomers to calculate accurate diameters and albedos for more than 129,000 asteroids in the main belt. It found a new class of extremely cool brown dwarfs, class Y, the coldest of which had a temperature of less than 300 kelvins (K; 27 °C or 80 °F). It discovered a brown-dwarf binary, WISE 1049−5319, which was the third nearest star system after Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s star; these two objects were also the closest brown dwarfs to the Sun. WISE was also sensitive to emissions from young distant galaxies in which stars are forming. Because these galaxies are billions of light-years from Earth, they must be the most luminous galaxies in the universe in order to have been observed with WISE.