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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."
for the infrared flashbulb light to bounce back. Plus, won't this contribute to galactic warming? NASA under Barack Obama is clearly in league with the Italians who are out to destroy America's universe.
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I am only interested in the coolest, most popular, stars.
Sorry about the mess.
Is it really "bathing" the cosmos? Don't most orbiting observatories just have sensors, not emitters?
I'm pretty sure we're talking passive sensors here, so it's not going to be "bathing the cosmos with infrared light" as much as it's going to be bathing in the infrared light of the cosmos. If scientists hadn't stopped writing in Latin, we wouldn't have these little word order screwups, now would we?
But it's good it will be finding the coolest stars. Aside from giving us new insights into the age of the universe and stellar evolution, it'll give NASA something to boast about on Facebook.
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The summary says it will be "bathing the cosmos with infrared light". What is this supposed to mean? The spacecraft will be detecting light, but will not be emitting it in any substantial quantity. In fact, WISE will be emitting very little infrared light at all (even for a spacecraft), as it is being kept cool for the next 10 months or so with an onboard supply of solid hydrogen.
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Wouldn't that scan complete one sky in 6 months? It's kind of strange to report that it will do 1.5 in 9.
It's because WISE has a limited life expentancy of 10 months. In that 10 months its expected to cover the whole sky 1.5 times.
The life expentancy is only 10 months because the instrument needs to be cooled, which is done with solid hydrogen. Once the hydrogen is gone, the primary mission is over. Not sure if they have a plan for afterwards and can get secondary uses out of it.
The satellite only has enough cryogen to keep cool for 1.5 sky surveys. Hence the summary.
I wonder if the satellite can still work without cryogen... I suppose it's going to be much noisier, but how much?
Ah, I'm wrong. From TFA:
"After a one-month checkout period, WISE will spend six months mapping the whole sky. It will then begin a second scan to uncover even more objects and to look for any changes in the sky that might have occurred since the first survey, according to NASA. This second partial sky survey will end about three months later when the spacecraft's frozen-hydrogen cryogen runs out."
I think it would be interesting to see if this thing picks up any sign of ETI... You could make the argument that initial communications for ETI might be in the infrared spectrum, as this is what is required to search for asteroids that might wipe out your home world. Any sufficiently intelligent species should have such an early warning system, indeed - you might see that as a necessary capability for an "intelligent" species.
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I wonder if this will find any stars closer to the earth that proxima centari?
It would be interesting if it found a brown or red dwarf companion to our star which orbits out beyond the ort cloud. An Ion or VASIMIR powered probe to this star would be cool and feasible even if it were up to 1/2 a light year away.
What would everyone think if we found out that our solar system is just another binary star system amonst the trillions and quadrillions of other multiple star systems out there....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Instead of going to some half-assed article from networkworld, why aren't we linking to the actual NASA WISE site? Original sources, people. It's not that hard.
I skimmed the summary not even noticing the stupid "bathing" thing', and then guess what 99% of the comments here are about?
Every time a summary has the tiniest little compiler error in it, no matter what it's about, any interest that might have been gleaned from TFA is lost. All you karma whores storm in like a Black Friday Walmart crowd trying to score your 5, Funny first posts and you fill up this board with this redundantly unfunny goofballing- "huh huh huh it's bathing the cosmos not the other way around huh huh huh"! My heart pains for any infrared astronomer out there drowning in this shit.
I am a journalist, and I will not be denied the right to use "bathing the cosmos". It is, in my view, and elegant turn of phrase. Please do not bother me with all this science nonsense about sensors.
Now excuse me, I have to get off to my 2nd job. It's not easy being a journalist these days. The paper could go belly-up any time. I moonlight writing advertising copy for real estate agents. There are tiny cabins that need to be described as "cozy", and houses needing tree work that need to be described as "nestled in the woods".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A lot of this depends on how timely a given probe team makes the data available on the net. For example, earlier this year hobbyists measured out of ring plane bumps on Saturns rings during Saturn's vernal equinox. Then the rings were edge-on to the Sun and tiny out-of-plane excursions cast measurable shadows on the reset of the ring.
A counter-example the Kepler project. They are NOT putting raw data on the web yet for the public to anyalyze. They probably have a private website somewhere with the data.
One of the most melancholy facts about astromony is that that while at this time and for the near future we have a civilization capable of supporting advanced orbital telescopes, the solar system is currently positioned pretty much in the center of glactic plane--safer from intergalactic bombardment by cosmic rays, but also our view is clouded by interference from so many local objects that we cannot see as much, or as far, or as far back, as would be if the solar system happened to be in the part of its phase where its orbit kind of bobs up or down out of the galactic plan for a few hundred thousand years.
The next time we'll have a clear view will be about 17 million years from now. That's for the northern sky. Add another 35 million years to that before we get a clear view to the south. I hope we're still here by then.