NEOWISE, a spacecraft that studied faraway cosmic objects before shifting its focus closer to home, has reached the end of its life. But its legacy lives on.
On Thursday, scientists and engineers in Southern California got an exclusive glimpse at a recent snapshot of Fornax, a constellation of stars in the Southern Hemisphere.
The image itself is not particularly exciting, at least not to the untrained eye. But to those gathered, the image represented the last light of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, a telescope orbiting the Earth that spent more than a decade scrutinizing the skies for any asteroids and comets that could one day pose a threat to our planet. At the end of last month, the spacecraft’s survey concluded, and it closed its telescopic eyes for the final time.
“This was the little space telescope that could,” said Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and principal investigator for NEOWISE. “We were really lucky to get to do this work.”
When the mission was launched in 2009, it was known simply as WISE. It spent the next year peering at faraway objects in the universe radiating infrared light, including supermassive black holes, brown dwarfs, dying stars and one of the most luminous galaxies in the cosmos.
WISE was never meant to study objects closer to Earth, but during its cosmic scans, scientists realized “it was pretty good at looking at asteroids, too,” Dr. Mainzer said. On one scan, WISE discovered the first asteroid to share an orbit with Earth, known as a Trojan. It also serendipitously observed a space rock named Dinkinesh, gathering data that came in handy years later on a recent NASA flyby of the object.
After its original survey, Dr. Mainzer and her colleagues successfully proposed that NASA extend the mission for a few months, with a focus on asteroid detection. Rebranded as NEOWISE, the spacecraft observed the solar system’s main asteroid belt until the space agency put its systems into hibernation in 2011.