NASA’s WISE infrared satellite to reveal new galaxies, stars, asteroids

An unmanned NASA satellite will soon survey the entire sky to discover millions of uncharted stars and galaxies, asteroids, and planetary "construction zones," providing valuable new information on our solar system, the Milky Way and the universe. NASA'S Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), scheduled to launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Dec. 9 or shortly after, will map the sky at four infrared wavelengths — invisible to the unaided human eye — with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than its predecessors. WISE will catalogue hundreds of millions of objects. "WISE will survey a large part of the universe that has never been surveyed before," said WISE's principal investigator, Edward L. (Ned) Wright, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the university's David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics. "I expect that what we find will be amazing. There is still so much we don't know.