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Four Years of NASA NEOWISE Data NASA's
Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has
released its fourth year of survey data. Since the mission was restarted in
December 2013, after a period of hibernation, the asteroid- and comet-hunter
has completely scanned the skies nearly eight times and has observed and
characterized 29,375 objects in four years of operations. This total includes
788 near-Earth objects and 136 comets since the mission restart.
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have
been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the planets in our solar system
into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood. Ten of the objects
discovered by NEOWISE in the past year have been classified as potentially
hazardous asteroids (PHAs). Near-Earth objects are classified as PHAs, based on
their size and how closely they can approach Earth's orbit.
"NEOWISE continues
to expand our catalog and knowledge of these elusive and important objects," said
Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator from NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "In total, NEOWISE has now characterized sizes
and reflectivities of over 1,300 near-Earth objects since the spacecraft was
launched, offering an invaluable resource for understanding the physical
properties of this population, and studying what they are made of and where
they have come from."
The NEOWISE team has
released an animation depicting detections made by the telescope over its four
years of surveying the solar system.
More than 2.5 million infrared
images of the sky were collected in the fourth year of operations by NEOWISE.
These data are combined with the year one through three NEOWISE data into a
single publicly available archive. That archive contains approximately 10.3
million sets of images and a database of more than 76 billion source detections
extracted from those images.
Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the
spacecraft launched in December 2009. It was placed in hibernation in 2011
after its primary astrophysics mission was completed. In September 2013, it was
reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission: to assist NASA's
efforts to identify and characterize the population of near-Earth objects.
NEOWISE also is characterizing more distant populations of asteroids and comets
to provide information about their sizes and compositions.
NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages and operates the NEOWISE mission
for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built
the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder,
Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science data processing takes place at the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages
JPL for NASA.
To review the latest
data release from NEOWISE, please visit:
http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/neowise/
For more information
about NEOWISE, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/neowise
http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/
More information about
asteroids and near-Earth objects is at:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch
To
learn more about NASA's efforts for Planetary Defense see:
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