Technology

NASA Completes Survey of the Entire Sky

NASA\'s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, called WISE, has just completed its first survey of the entire sky. The globe-trotting satellite has generated more...

Federal News Radio Custom Media@WTOPWFEDcustom

July 21, 2010 2:54 pm

< a min read

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, called WISE, has just completed its first survey of the entire sky. The globe-trotting satellite has generated more than one million images so far, of everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.

The mission scanned strips of the sky as it orbited around the Earth’s poles since it launched last December.

One pictured region shows the Pleiades cluster of stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, resting in a tangled bed of wispy dust, highlighting the telescope’s ability to take wide shots of vast regions of space.

So far, WISE has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, both known and previously unseen, most lying in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. 90 of them are new near-Earth objects.