NASA's WISE Eye on the Universe Begins All-Sky Survey Mission

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VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey
Explorer, or WISE, lifted off over the Pacific Ocean this morning on
its way to map the entire sky in infrared light.

A Delta II rocket carrying the spacecraft launched at 9:09 a.m. EST
from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket deposited
WISE into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth.

"WISE thundered overhead, lighting up the pre-dawn skies," said
William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "All systems are looking good, and we
are on our way to seeing the entire infrared sky better than ever
before."

Engineers acquired a signal from the spacecraft via NASA's Tracking
and Data Relay Satellite System just 10 seconds after the spacecraft
separated from the rocket. Approximately three minutes later, WISE
re-oriented itself with its solar panels facing the sun to generate
its own power. The next major event occurred about 17 minutes later.
Valves on the cryostat, a chamber of super-cold hydrogen ice that
cools the WISE instrument, opened. Because the instrument sees the
infrared, or heat, signatures of objects, it must be kept at chilly
temperatures -- its coldest detectors are less than minus 447 degrees
Fahrenheit.

"WISE needs to be colder than the objects it's observing," said Ned
Wright of UCLA, the mission's principal investigator. "Now we're
ready to see the infrared glow from hundreds of thousands of
asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies."

With the spacecraft stable, cold and communicating with mission
controllers at JPL, a month-long checkout and calibration is
underway.

WISE will see the infrared colors of the whole sky with sensitivity
and resolution far better than the last infrared sky survey,
performed 26 years ago. The space telescope will spend nine months
scanning the sky once, then one-half the sky a second time. The
primary mission will end when WISE's frozen hydrogen runs out, about
10 months after launch.

Just about everything in the universe glows in infrared, which means
the mission will catalog a variety of astronomical targets.
Near-Earth asteroids, stars, planet-forming disks and distant
galaxies all will be easy for the mission to see. Hundreds of
millions of objects will populate the WISE atlas, providing
astronomers and other space missions, such as NASA's planned James
Webb Space Telescope, with a long-lasting infrared roadmap.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was competitively
selected under the Explorers Program, managed by NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by
the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was
built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo.
Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. NASA's Launch Services Program at NASA's
Kennedy Space Center, Fla., managed the payload integration and the
launch service.

More information about the WISE mission is available online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/wise

Source: NASA