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NASA launched a new infrared space telescope—WISE (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A Delta II rocket carried WISE into the polar orbit that is 326 miles above Earth at 6:09 a.m. PST.

Through WISE, NASA is hoping to get detailed information regarding hundreds of millions of unseen and far away objects in space besides comets and asteroids.

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

WISE’s purpose in space

NASA’s has spent $320 million in building WISE which has been specifically designed to detect the infrared glow coming out of comets and asteroids in the galaxy.

According to NASA, the spacecraft WISE is expected to scan the whole sky one and the half times during its 10-month mission in the space, looking to uncover hidden objects like dark asteroids, stars and luminous galaxies.

The mission’s principal investigator, Ned Wright said in a statement, "Now we're ready to see the infrared glow from hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies."

According to the NASA, almost every object in the universe glows in infrared that will make WISE’s work of cataloging objects easy.

The WISE is expected to reach farthest in the universe, to find the most distant and obscure star clusters’. These far away galaxies are located 10 billion light years away from Earth, oozing trillion times more light than sun.

Instruments onboard WISE

The most important instrument onboard WISE is a telescope measuring 40cm (16-inch), which is connected to four separate infrared detectors.

Each detector connected to the telescope, has 1,032,256 pixels of resolution, more than the Infrared Astronomical Satellite’s 62 pixels total resolution.

According to the scientists these detectors are 500 times more sensitive as compared to the ones in 1983. They are also capable of producing photograph-quality images of the object they will shoot.

All these important instruments are kept safe in a cool place within a tank that is filled with frozen hydrogen. This is done to prevent them from heat contamination during observations.

All the images snapped by the spacecraft will be transferred back to Earth via Ku-band frequencies travelling at the rate of 100 Mb/s.

The complete catalog version of the data collected by the WISE will be released in 2012.

Source: themoneytimes.com