"Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids"

Those are the words of UCLA's Ned Wright, a PI with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

NASA is putting out a press release summarizing the results of the project so far. For example:

"We are taking a census of a small sample of near-Earth objects to get a better idea of how they vary," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a program to catalog asteroids seen with WISE.

So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.


details here

Tags

More like this

The red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer discovered its first ever comet as part of an infrared survey of the whole sky. The…
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been all snapped together and stuff and is ready to be launched into outer space from Vandenberg in November. This will be a major eye in the sky for cosmology, since it will be able to see things that heretofore only space insects could see....…
NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) on Thurs., Sept. 29, to reveal near-Earth asteroid findings and implications for future research. The briefing will take place at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, launched in…
The asteroid Baptistina has been on trial for several years, implicated in the K/T Boundary mass extinction event that killed off the dinosuars. But the jury is finally in. Baptistina is off the hook. Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission indicate the…