More near Earth objects found by WISE
NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) has released its third year of survey data, including the discovery of 97 previously unknown objects.
Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013.
For reasons that baffle me, NASA added “Near-Earth Object” to the telescope’s name when they restarted the mission, making its official name now NEOWISE.
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NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) has released its third year of survey data, including the discovery of 97 previously unknown objects.
Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013.
For reasons that baffle me, NASA added “Near-Earth Object” to the telescope’s name when they restarted the mission, making its official name now NEOWISE.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
NEOWISE is the recommission of the primary WISE mission, after its cooling hydrogen gas ran out and made its infrared mirror insensitive to the cosmological objects it was originally made to hunt. It lost its original abilities, according to plan, but can still do something, it is a rare space telescope after all. It’s like Kepler and K2, they improvise (informally foresaw from the beginning, I bet) a secondary mission when the primary ran out of gas. NEOWISE is too warm to find much else than near Earth asteroids. So that’s what it does nowadays. That’s what it can do.
I thought Neo, is the One?
(Matrix clip)
https://youtu.be/zYwdzYC3uUc?t=25
ayne,
Yeah, just deny reality, and anything will become true for YOU!
(The liberal leftist assumption)
MATRIX is communist propaganda.
The video clip on this link shows asteroids or comets whatever that happen to cross Kepler’s field of view. Ignore the flashes that are just cosmic radiation noise, and the stationary sources that are just background stars. The big one is Neptune and the dot following it is its moon Triton. But everything that moves moderately across the field is an asteroid, or “an object”.
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-kepler-caught-hundreds-asteroids.html
AFAIK none of those Kepler observed could have their orbit determined. They were all considered noise. Too narrow field of view to locate any of them. But WISE is wide field and can follow them during long enough time to fix their orbits.
200 years ago an astronomer went out to the balcony of his Paris flat to have a look at the sky between his cocktail parties (being an astronomer was still a very nice hobby lifestyle choice back then). He there discovered almost half of the asteroids known at the time. Now space telescopes are wasting such observations by the millions! The “big data” problem.