Whitney
Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@xxxxxxxxxxxx
J.D.
Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA
Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@xxxxxxxx
News release: 2010-052
Feb. 17, 2010
NASA's
WISE Mission Releases Medley of First Images
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-052&cid=release_2010-052
PASADENA,
Calif. -- A diverse cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the first survey
images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or
WISE.
Since WISE
began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space
telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared
images. Four new, processed pictures illustrate a sampling of the mission's
targets -- a wispy comet, a bursting star-forming cloud, the grand Andromeda
galaxy and a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies. The images are online at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html
.
"WISE
has worked superbly," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the
Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These
first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of helping to track
asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically
important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared."
One
image shows the beauty of a comet called Siding Spring. As the comet parades
toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared light visible to WISE. The
comet's tail, which stretches about 10 million miles, looks like a streak of
red paint. A bright star appears below it in blue.
"We've
got a candy store of images coming down from space," said Edward (Ned)
Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator for WISE. "Everyone has their
favorite flavors, and we've got them all."
During
its survey, the mission is expected to find perhaps dozens of comets, including
some that ride along in orbits that take them somewhat close to Earth's path
around the sun. WISE will help unravel clues locked inside comets about how our
solar system came to be.
Another
image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 3603, lying
20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. This
star-forming factory is churning out batches of new stars, some of which are
monstrously massive and hotter than the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding
dust clouds, causing them to glow at infrared wavelengths.
WISE
will see hundreds of similar star-making regions in our galaxy, helping
astronomers piece together a picture of how stars are born. The observations
also provide an important link to understanding violent episodes of star
formation in distant galaxies. Because NGC 3603 is much closer, astronomers use
it as a lab to probe the same type of action that is taking place billions of
light-years away.
Traveling
farther out from our Milky Way, the third new image shows our nearest large
neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Andromeda is a bit bigger than our Milky
Way and about 2.5 million light-years away. The new picture highlights WISE's
wide field of view -- it covers an area larger than 100 full moons and even
shows other smaller galaxies near Andromeda, all belonging to our "local
group" of more than about 50 galaxies. WISE will capture the entire local
group.
The fourth WISE picture is even farther out, in a
region of hundreds of galaxies all bound together into one family. Called the
Fornax cluster, these galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The
mission's infrared views reveal both stagnant and active galaxies, providing a
census of data on an entire galactic community.
"All these pictures tell a story about our
dusty origins and destiny," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project
scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE
sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of
our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across
our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation across other galaxies,
and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years
away."
Other mission targets include comets, asteroids and
cool stars called brown dwarfs. WISE discovered its first near-Earth asteroid
on Jan. 12, and first comet on Jan. 22. The mission will scan the sky
one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant needed to
chill its instruments will be depleted.
JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers
Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages.
The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the
spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For
more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/WISE and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu
and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .
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