A team of NASA scientists studying data collected by the NEOWISE mission, designed to detect and catalog small objects passing near Earth, has published over 26 million previously unreleased images.
A follow-up to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission launched in 2009, which studied the entire night sky and conducted 21 complete sky surveys during more than a decade of operation, NEOWISE re-tasked the same telescope in 2013 to look for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a potential threat if they crashed into the Earth.
During its operational phase, NEOWISE detected over 3,000 NEOs, including larger objects like comets and smaller objects like asteroids. The team believes this figure represents roughly 10% of the objects currently believed to exist close to Earth.
While still a fraction of the total, the team says that cataloging this many NEOs in such detail was only possible due to NEOWISE’s expansive view of the night sky.
“Because of NEOWISE’s extensive view of the sky, we get a more complete picture of the asteroids and comets in Earth’s orbital neighborhood,” explained Roc Cutri, NEOWISE Task Lead and Project Scientist at IPAC, in a statement. “The data provide a unique way of understanding factors like the size and rotation period of these NEOs.”
NASA Satellite Capturing IMages of Small Objects Passing Near Earth Meets Fiery End
The NEOWISE mission completed its survey of NEOs on July 15th, 2024. According to NASA, the mission came to a final, explosive conclusion, as expected, when the satellite “reentered and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere at 8:49 p.m. EDT on November 1, 2024,” due to increased solar activity.
The majority of the mission images were released two weeks later, on November 14th. This final batch, which includes what the researchers describe as “never before seen images,” was released by the team at IPAC, a science center at Caltech, on November 26th.
The final object witnessed by NEOWISE was an asteroid called 2007 LV8. The space telescope spotted that NEO over 100 times in its final days of surveys since its orbit closely followed the instrument’s scan pattern. According to the mission scientists, findings like 2007 LV8 show how valuable WISE and NEOWISE’s ability to stay aloft for such a long period proved to be for collecting data on NEOs.
“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.
More Mysteries Left to Discover in Captured NEOWISE Data
The massive catalog of images is available on a page dedicated to the NEOWISE mission. Although the images are intended for scientific research, the team says the public can also appreciate their visual impact.
“The WISE and NEOWISE data releases are built for researchers, but they also embody some of the most amazing images of our infrared sky,” said Robert Hurt, IPAC Visualization Scientist. “They are so easy to work with it’s almost too easy to make a beautiful image from them! That’s why I wanted to revisit the archive to locate some hidden gems we missed before.”
The team says their research is just the first wave. Future tools and techniques will reveal even more details about NEOs and the cosmos waiting to be found in the decade and a half of sky surveys collected by the satellite.
“We know there are more things to discover in the NEOWISE data that we just haven’t noticed yet,” said Masiero. “As astronomers develop new tools and techniques and as new surveys are conducted, we can be sure the NEOWISE archive will be one of the first places we look for the data needed to better understand our universe.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.