PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM NEOWISE: AN ENHANCEMENT TO THE<i>WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER</i>FOR SOLAR SYSTEM SCIENCE

TLDR

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mapped the entire sky in four infrared bands with sensitivity and resolution far surpassing earlier missions such as IRAS and COBE. NASA’s NEOWISE enhancement to WISE’s data‑processing pipeline detects, catalogs, and archives moving solar‑system objects, mining the survey for thousands of asteroids, comets, Trojans, and Centaurs. By February 2011, NEOWISE had identified more than 157,000 asteroids—including over 500 near‑Earth objects and roughly 120 comets—providing a rich dataset for future studies.

Abstract

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has surveyed the entire sky at four infrared wavelengths with greatly improved sensitivity and spatial resolution compared to its predecessors, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite and the Cosmic Background Explorer. NASA's Planetary Science Division has funded an enhancement to the WISE data processing system called "NEOWISE" that allows detection and archiving of moving objects found in the WISE data. NEOWISE has mined the WISE images for a wide array of small bodies in our solar system, including near-Earth objects (NEOs), Main Belt asteroids, comets, Trojans, and Centaurs. By the end of survey operations in 2011 February, NEOWISE identified over 157,000 asteroids, including more than 500 NEOs and ∼120 comets. The NEOWISE data set will enable a panoply of new scientific investigations.