NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft launched to Earth orbit in 2009 and was placed in hibernation in 2011. Then, in 2013, the probe was reactivated for a new mission called NEOWISE that centered on hunting for asteroids and comets.
NEOWISE closed its eyes for good this past summer and fell back to Earth on Nov. 1. During its long and productive life, the probe spent nearly 15 years in space, conducting 21 infrared surveys of the entire night sky and capturing all manner of cosmic phenomena.
For most of its operational life, the telescope focused on identifying and observing small objects in our solar system, such as asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects (NEOs). Thanks to NEOWISE observing the same parts of the night sky at different intervals, researchers have been able to track the movements and behavior of a number of nearby celestial objects.
The final NEOWISE data release was made available to the astronomy community on Nov. 14. To help celebrate that milestone and the mission’s success overall, NEOWISE team members have unveiled six new images dug out of the telescope’s archives.
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“Being able to watch the changing sky for nearly 15 years has opened a new avenue for time-domain science, for everything from the closest asteroids to the most distant quasars,” NEOWISE Deputy Principal Investigator Joe Masiero, a research scientist at IPAC, said in a Nov. 26 press release.
IPAC, which is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, originally stood for “Infrared Processing & Analysis Center.” But the facility “has since grown beyond its inaugural name — and is now known simply as ‘IPAC’ — by building upon its experience in infrared data processing and analysis to provide a range of support for more than 20 missions and projects with observatories both in space and on the ground,” according to the IPAC website.
One of the newly released images captures the California Nebula in all of its glory. The infrared shot shows green and red dust clouds underlying the nebula shimmering against a backdrop of stars.
The California Nebula, which is about 100 light-years wide, sits about 1,000 light-years away from Earth, in the Perseus constellation. It was named after its resemblance to the California coastline, so the newly released image is particularly meaningful to the NEOWISE data-processing team at IPAC, according to Masiero.
“I’m really grateful for all of the people at IPAC who have put so much effort into making this the best dataset possible, for today and for future generations,” he said.
Another featured image depicts the Gecko Nebula, so named because part of the cloud looks like a lizard’s snout.
“Near the ‘snout’ of the gecko you can see a blazing star with a strong red tint, due to its brightness at longer wavelengths of infrared light,” IPAC team members wrote in an image description. “This baby star is in its final stages of formation, and while it gobbles up the last of its fuel, some is ejected away in jets of gas that are carving cavities through the surrounding dust clouds.”
A third newly released image shows the nebula CG12, which looks like a tadpole. “It is an example of a ‘cometary globule,’ where a denser region of dust trails off into thread-like strands,” the IPAC image description reads. “While challenging to see in visible light images, WISE easily shows the full extent of the globule’s tail as it lights up at longer wavelengths of infrared light.”
You can see, and learn more about, all six images in the Nov. 26 IPAC statement. And they represent just a tiny fraction of the gems hidden away in the WISE/NEOWISE archives, mission team members said.
“We know there are more things to discover in the NEOWISE data that we just haven’t noticed yet,” Masiero said. “As astronomers develop new tools and techniques and as new surveys are conducted, we can be sure the NEOWISE archive will be one of the first places we look for the data needed to better understand our universe.”