NASA releases sky-mapping archive

LOS ANGELES  NASA has released a trove of data from its sky-mapping mission, allowing scientists and anyone with access to the Internet to peruse millions of galaxies, stars, asteroids and other hard-to-see objects.

Many of the targets in the celestial catalog released online this week have been previously observed, but there are significant new discoveries. The missions finds include more than 33,000 new asteroids floating between Mars and Jupiter and 20 comets.

NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which carried an infrared telescope, in December 2009 to scan the cosmos in finer detail than previous missions. The spacecraft, known as WISE, mapped the sky 1 1/2 times during its 14-month mission, snapping more than 2 1/2 million images from its polar orbit.

The spacecrafts ability to detect heat glow helps it find dusty, cold and distant objects that are often invisible to regular telescopes.

The batch of images made available represents a little over half of whats been observed in the all-sky survey. The full cosmic census is scheduled for release next spring.

The spectacular new data just released remind us that we have many new neighbors, said Pete Schultz, a space scientist at Brown University, who had no role in the project.

University of Alabama astronomer William Keel already started mining the database for quasars  compact, bright objects powered by super-massive black holes.

If I see a galaxy with highly ionized gas clouds in its outskirts and no infrared evidence of a hidden quasar, thats a sign that the quasar has essentially shut down in the last 30,000 to 50,000 years, Keel said.

WISE ran out of coolant in October, making it unable to chill its heat-sensitive instruments and observe faraway objects. So it instead spent the next four months seeking out near-Earth asteroids and comets that should help scientists better calculate whether any are potentially threatening. The spacecraft went into hibernation in February.

The mission, managed by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was hundreds of times more sensitive than its predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which launched in 1983 and made the first all-sky map in infrared wavelength.

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Online:

WISE archive:

http://bit.ly/ebnSji

Instructions:

http://bit.ly/fjyACg

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