An artist’s illustration of the WISE spacecraft in orbit around Earth. The mission was renamed NEOWISE in 2013 to reflect a new focus on finding near-Earth objects. Photo Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech After more than a decade of mapping the sky, NASA’s NEOWISE telescope, the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, was officially decommissioned last week. During its nearly 15-year run, NEOWISE observed the cosmos at infrared wavelengths and collected data on more than 740 million objects, including stars, galaxies and potentially hazardous asteroids.
But the mission that started with NEOWISE is not over. NASA will soon launch a new mission called Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) – the first infrared space telescope tasked with searching out dangerous near-earth objects. Amy Mainzer, UCLA Professor of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, is the principle investigator on both NEOWISE and NEO Surveryor.