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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 5, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Photo of WISE satellite

Edward Wright

"The Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer - WISE"

ABSTRACT -- The Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a NASA Medium Explorer (MIDEX) currently under construction which will survey the entire sky in 4 mid-infrared bands at 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 microns with vastly greater sensitivity than previous all-sky surveys at these wavelengths.

The WISE long wavelength channels will be very powerful for detecting Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies, and WISE should detect the most luminous galaxies in the Universe. The WISE short wavelength channels will be very powerful for detecting old cold brown dwarfs, and WISE should detect the nearest brown dwarfs to the Sun. WISE will also measure the radiometric diameters of about 250,000 asteroids.

WISE will have a 40 cm cryogenic telescope, 1024x1024 arrays, a scan mirror to freeze images on the arrays while the spacecraft scans continuously, and will take 47'x47' images every 11 seconds in all four bands from an IRAS/COBE style Sun-synchronous nearly polar low Earth orbit. WISE is expected to launch in late 2009.

SPEAKER -- Edward L. (Ned) Wright is holder of a David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. After graduate work at Harvard working a balloon-borne far-infrared telescope while he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, he taught at MIT before moving to UCLA. As part of his research he was scientist-in-charge of science data processing for COBE, the COsmic Background Explorer, and he is now a co-investigator for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) which is making a detailed study of CMB temperature differences around the sky since its launch in 2001. He is also an interdisciplinary scientist on the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003, and the Principal Investigator on the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to be launched in late 2009.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov