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Source: Reuters
NASA's new infrared space telescope was launched into orbit on a
10-month mission expected to reveal previously unseen objects
ranging from near-Earth asteroids to some of the most distant
galaxies in the cosmos.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, was carried into
a polar orbit 525 km above Earth by a Delta II rocket that lifted
off before dawn from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central
California.
"All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the
entire sky better than ever before," said William Irace, the
mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena.
The $439 million instrument is designed to scan the entire heavens
for the infrared radiation, or glow of heat, given off by objects
that are too cold, too far away or too shrouded in dust to be seen
by conventional visible-light telescopes.
Scientists say the spacecraft's detectors are about 500 times more
sensitive than those of the last infrared sky survey in 1983, and
are capable of producing photograph-quality images of the objects
they find.
Among phenomena likely to be uncovered are large numbers of failed
stars called brown dwarfs - balls of gas many times smaller than
the sun that lack sufficient mass to trigger their own internal
stellar engines.
Optically invisible, brown dwarfs are thought to be more numerous
than actual stars in the nearby universe.
Some may reside even closer to Earth than the nearest known
star, Proxima Centauri, about four light years away.
Closer to home, WISE is expected to find hundreds of previously
uncharted asteroids and comets in the neighbourhood of Earth's
orbit, revealing more about the inventory of such near-Earth
objects and their composition.
At the farthest reach of its gaze, WISE will be able to illuminate
and peer through the dense haze that has obscured some of the most
distant and powerful star clusters in the universe - a class of
objects called ultra-luminous galaxies.
Located 10 billion light years from Earth, these galaxies are
believed to be super-incubators of new stars, shining with more
than a trillion times the light of the sun, though most of that
light is emitted in infrared.
