NASA’s NEOWISE Infrared Heritage Will Live On

NASA’s NEOWISE Infrared Heritage Will Live On

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  • Post last modified:July 14, 2024
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“Without coolant, we had to find a way to cool the spacecraft down enough to measure infrared signals from asteroids,” said Joseph Masiero, NEOWISE deputy principal investigator and a scientist at IPAC, a research organization at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “By commanding the telescope to stare into deep space for several months, we determined it would radiate only enough heat to reach lower temperatures that would still allow us to acquire high-quality data.” NASA reactivated the mission in 2013 under the , a precursor to the agency’s current planetary defense program, with the new name NEOWISE.

By repeatedly observing the sky from low Earth orbit, NEOWISE has made 1.45 million infrared measurements of over 44,000 solar system objects to date. That includes more than 3,000 NEOs, 215 of which the space telescope discovered. Twenty-five of those are comets, among them the famed comet NEOWISE that was in the summer of 2020.

“The spacecraft has surpassed all expectations and provided vast amounts of data that the science community will use for decades to come,” said Joseph Hunt, NEOWISE project manager at JPL. “Scientists and engineers who worked on WISE and through NEOWISE also have built a knowledge base that will help inform future infrared survey missions.”

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The space telescope will continue its survey until July 31. Then, on Aug. 8, mission controllers at JPL will send a command that puts NEOWISE into hibernation for the last time. Since its launch, NEOWISE’s orbit has been dropping closer to Earth. NEOWISE is expected to burn up in our planet’s atmosphere sometime between late 2024 and early 2025.

More About the Mission

NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor support the objectives of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 directed NASA to discover and characterize at least 90% of the near-Earth objects more than 140 meters (460 feet) across that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit. Objects of this size can cause significant regional damage, or worse, should they impact the Earth.

JPL manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for PDCO within the Science Mission Directorate. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science data processing, archiving, and distribution is done at IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

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For more information about NEOWISE, visit:

Feed By Today and Features – NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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