WISE / NEOWISE
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NASA)
Decommissioned · 2024- Operator
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Launched
- December 14, 2009
- Primary mission
- Astrophysics all-sky infrared survey (2010 – 2011)
- Reactivated as NEOWISE
- December 2013 — near-Earth object survey
- Telescope
- 40 cm, four infrared bands (3.4, 4.6, 12, 22 μm)
WISE — the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer — is a NASA space telescope that mapped the entire sky in infrared light using a 40 cm cryogenically cooled telescope and four-million-pixel detector array. The primary survey produced a catalog of roughly three-quarters of a billion objects, including the coolest and nearest brown dwarfs ever found and the most luminous galaxies known in the universe.
After exhausting its solid hydrogen cryogen, WISE was placed in hibernation in February 2011. In December 2013 NASA reactivated the spacecraft under the new name NEOWISE to focus on detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets whose orbits bring them close to Earth.
The mission has been a major contributor to NASA's planetary defense efforts and has produced one of the most comprehensive infrared maps of the sky ever assembled.
Alethium's role
Alethium Corp. has supported the WISE / NEOWISE ground system as a direct prime contractor to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, contributing mission-operations software and infrastructure across the mission's astrophysics survey and its later NEOWISE near-Earth-object survey.