„The NEOWISE mission has been instrumental in our quest to map the sky and understand the near-Earth environment. Its tremendous number of discoveries have expanded our knowledge of asteroids and comets, while enhancing our nation’s planetary defenses,” said NASA JPL Director Larry Leshin. As we say goodbye to NEOWISE, we celebrate the team behind it for their amazing achievements.”
Through repeated observations of the sky from low Earth orbit, NEOWISE produced all-sky maps containing 1.45 million infrared measurements of more than 44,000 Solar System objects. Of the more than 3,000 near-Earth objects it detected, 215 were originally discovered by NEOWISE. The mission also discovered 25 new comets, including the famous comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE. The night sky spread across the sky In the summer of 2020.
In addition to leaving a trove of scientific data, the spacecraft helped inform the development of NASA’s first infrared space telescope designed to detect near-Earth objects: the NEO Surveyor.
„The NeoWise mission has provided a unique, long-term data set of the infrared sky,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator of both NeoWise and NeoSurveyor at the University of California, Los Angeles. „But its additional legacy is that it helped lay the groundwork for NASA’s next Planetary Defense Infrared Space Telescope. „
Also managed by JPL, the NEO surveyor will detect some of the harder near-Earth objects, such as dark asteroids and comets that don’t reflect much visible light, as well as objects approaching Earth from Earth’s direction. the sun The next-generation infrared space telescope will greatly enhance the capabilities of the international planetary defense community, which includes NASA-funded ground surveys. Construction of the NEO Surveyor is already well underway, with a launch date set no earlier than 2027.
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The NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor missions support the missions of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office at the agency’s headquarters. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 directed NASA to detect and classify at least 90% of near-Earth objects greater than 460 feet (140 meters) that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit. Objects of this size can cause significant regional damage or worse if they impact Earth.
NASA JPL manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office in the Science Mission Directorate. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah built the science instrument. BAE Systems of Boulder, Colorado built the spacecraft. Scientific data processing, archiving, and distribution are performed at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
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