First light from WISE. Image Credit: NASA/JP-Caltech/UCLA

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer also known as WISE gets its first view of the sky. I have to say, this is pretty remarkable, less than a month between launch and releasing a first light image.

Among the ambitious plans for the WISE mission is the detection of Brown Dwarf stars down to a temperature of 150^o K out to 10 light years, and 450^oK out to 75 light years. This of course is very interesting because at the moment if the failed stars are there they are invisible to us.

Another very exciting aspect of this mission is the hunt for asteroids and an extensive education and public outreach program led by UC Berkeley. Apparently they are going to involve the public in searching for the asteroids including students. So that IMHO makes this one of the most exciting missions in a while.  More about the education and public outreach.  Oh and you may note the 150^oK is around -190^oF/-123^oC!!

Pay a visit to the WISE website by clicking the link below for more details about this mission.

About the image from the WISE website:

This infrared snapshot of a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way was taken shortly after NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) ejected its cover. The “first-light” picture shows thousands of stars and covers an area three times the size of the Moon. WISE will take more than a million similar pictures covering the whole sky. The image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction, in order to help calibrate its pointing system. The mission’s survey will be done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the motion to create freeze-frame images. The team is working now to match the motions of the spacecraft and the scan mirror precisely. This eight-second exposure shows infrared light from three of WISE’s four wavelength bands: Blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively.