By Dean Murray via SWNS
A dead space telescope has left behind jaw-dropping unreleased cosmic images.
NASA’s NEOWISE telescope ended its journey through space on November 1 when it re-entered and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Now the team at IPAC, a science center at Caltech Research University in Pasadena, say they have released six new images from the mission’s archival data as a tribute to this landmark project.
Described as “one further gift from the prolific mission”, the final data release from NEOWISE was released to the astronomy community on 14 November, encompassing over 26 million images and nearly 200 billion sources detected by the telescope.
They include a region dubbed the “Gecko Nebula” for its resemblance to a downturned head with a pointed snout, a tadpole-shaped nebula known as CG12, and the vast California Nebula, which extends 100 light years through space.
NEOWISE was launched as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in 2009 and then reactivated in 2013 as NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting phase of the mission.
The infrared space telescope studied the entire night sky and conducted 21 complete sky surveys during more than a decade of operation. The mission focused on identifying and studying small objects in our solar system like asteroids and comets, also known as near-Earth objects (NEOs), but the infrared data collected by the telescope has proven to have countless applications throughout the field of astronomy.
The mission concluded operations in July 2024, and during its 15 years in space, scientists have been able to revisit the same areas of the sky again and again, with most being observed by NEOWISE at least 220 times. This repeated observation helps astronomers search for and study objects that change in brightness or location.
“Being able to watch the changing sky for nearly 15 years has opened a new avenue for time-domain science, for everything from the closest asteroids to the most distant quasars,” said Joe Masiero, Research Scientist at IPAC and the Deputy Principal Investigator of the mission.
