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NASA WISE Satellite Blasts Into Space
coondoggie writes "After a three day delay, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer this morning blasted into space courtesy of a Delta II rocket and will soon begin bathing the cosmos with infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images. The space agency says the WISE spacecraft will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The idea behind the spacecraft is to uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets."
Bathing the cosmos in infrared light? Did NASA launch an intergalactic flash light?
Seriously coondoggie, that's not how it works. This is an IR detector. Speed of light limitations, not to mention power requirements for umping enough IR into the sky to see any reflections, I mean... wow.