After completing its main mission of composing a map of the sky in infrared light, the WISE ( Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ) space telescope has reached the end point of its internal coolant supply, essential for its mission. Despite this assuming that WISE is starting to "heat up", NASA has decided that the mission will continue. The telescope will now focus on our closest neighbors: asteroids and comets that travel along with the planets in our solar system.
" Two of the four infrared detectors are still working , even in warmer temperatures, so we can use the bands to continue our search for asteroids and comets," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mainzer is the principal investigator for the new phase of the mission, now known as the NEOWISE post-cryogenic mission , which takes its name from the acronym for a near-Earth object, NEO, and from the WISE telescope itself.
"The scientific data collected by WISE will be used by the scientific community for decades," said Jaya Bajpayee, the manager of the WISE program in NASA's Space Science Astrophysics Division. "It will also provide a sky map for observatories like the future James Webb ."
