#IR telescope launched from V-berg
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Infrared space telescope launched from California
Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES
Mon Dec 14, 2009 3:03pm EST
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA's new infrared space telescope was launched
into orbit on Monday on a 10-month mission expected to reveal previously
unseen objects ranging from near-Earth asteroids to some of the most
distant galaxies in the cosmos.
Science
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, was carried into a
polar orbit 326 miles above Earth by a Delta II rocket that lifted off
before dawn from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.
"All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the entire
sky better than ever before," said William Irace, the mission's project
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
The $320 million instrument is designed to scan the entire heavens for
the infrared radiation, or glow of heat, given off by objects that are
too cold, too far away or too shrouded in dust to be seen by conventional
visible-light telescopes.
Scientists say the spacecraft's detectors are about 500 times more
sensitive than those of the last infrared sky survey in 1983, and are
capable of producing photograph-quality images of the objects they find.
Among phenomena likely to be uncovered are large numbers of failed stars
called brown dwarfs -- balls of gas many times smaller than the sun that
lack sufficient mass to trigger their own internal stellar engines.
Optically invisible, brown dwarfs are thought to be more numerous than
actual stars in the nearby universe. Some may reside even closer to Earth
than the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, about 4 light years away.
Closer to home, WISE is expected to find hundreds of previously uncharted
asteroids and comets in the neighborhood of Earth's orbit, revealing more
about the inventory of such "near-Earth objects" and their composition.
At the farthest reach of its gaze, WISE will be able to illuminate and
peer through the dense haze that has obscured some of the most distant
and powerful star clusters in the universe -- a class of objects called
ultra-luminous galaxies.
Located 10 billion light years from Earth, these galaxies are believed to
be super-incubators of new stars, shining with more than a trillion times
the light of the sun, though most of that light is emitted in infrared.
(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Cynthia Osterman)
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