Friday, December 11, 2009

What NASA's WISE Space Mapper Will Look For In The Sky

The 40 cm diameter WISE telescope is an all aluminum optical system that will produce images of the sky with 2.75 arcsec resolution in four infrared spectral bands. Here the lead optical test engineer attaches the back-end imager optics to the afocal. This entire telescope will be mounted inside the WISE cryostat and cooled to about 17K. The WISE telescope was developed by L3 Communications-SSG.

From Popular Mechanics:

Early on Friday, NASA will launch its newest satellite, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Its mission: To catalogue the murky parts of our universe in never-before-seen detail. As the craft orbits Earth, it will capture images of the sky with an infrared digital camera that snaps pictures every 11 seconds. So what's out there that WISE's team of astronomers are so eager to see? Here's a list.

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