03.03.10 NASA’s WISE Telescope is on Form

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is currently orbiting around the Earth. It is flying 525km above sea level and completes fifteen loops around the Earth every day. It was placed there by a Delta II rocket on 14 December 2009, by NASA.

WISE is a telescope which looks out into space. Its mission is to survey the entire sky. It will look at distant galaxies, small brown dwarf stars, and comets and asteroids within our own solar system. It’s very important that WISE is in space to do this. WISE would not work as a ground-based telescope.

This is because WISE is looking at infrared radiation. This is one of the many types of ‘invisible light’ that human eyes cannot see. Other types within the electromagnetic spectrum include radio waves and X-rays. Although you can’t see infrared radiation, you can feel it. If you have ever felt the heat from a hot object without touching it, most of what you are feeling is heat transferred by infrared emission.
 
We have to use special detectors in order to truly see the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, it’s no good trying to detect infrared radiation coming from space, because the Earth’s atmosphere blocks it. In order to see it, we need to go above the Earth’s atmosphere, into space itself.

Using infrared light we can see things that we cannot usually see with normal visible light. For example, asteroids are very small and faint, many are practically impossible to spot using normal telescopes. However, they do glow in infrared light, so they are easier to find using an infrared telescope.

 
WISE is hundreds of times more sensitive than NASA’s previous infrared telescope. That was the Infrared Astronomical Telescope which operated in 1983. It is hoped that in its lifetime WISE will uncover a thousand new objects in our solar system and will double or triple the number of known brown dwarf stars.
 
WISE is not the only infrared telescope in operation at the moment. It is working alongside NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, which is operated by the European Space Agency.


 
In February 2010 NASA released the first pictures from WISE, which indicated the telescope was working perfectly. You can view these images in full resolution by clicking on the following link:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html