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<td style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; COLOR: #000000" dir=rtl width=766 colSpan=3 align=justify>July 17, 2010
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<td style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; COLOR: #000000" dir=rtl width=655 align=justify>Prolific NASA Sky-Mapper Finds 25,000 Hidden Asteroids

SPACE.com
posted: 16 July 2010

A prolific NASA sky-mapping telescope will complete its first full survey of the sky Saturday, having beamed back to Earth more than a million images of everything from asteroids and comets to distant galaxies – some previously unseen until now.

"The primary goal of the mission is to do an all-sky survey in the thermal infrared with much higher sensitivity than has ever been done before," Edward Wright, the principal investigator of the mission at the University of California, Los Angeles, told SPACE.com. "We're succeeding in that."

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, of which 25,000 were previously undetected. Most of these space rocks are located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but some – called near-Earth objects – include asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth. WISE has observed over 90 new near-Earth objects, and has also discovered over a dozen comets that orbit far from Earth.

Space Telescope Spots 25,000 New Asteroids

Comets, brown dwarfs also seen as WISE ends first full sky scan

<BLOCKQUOTE>by Alicia Chang

الأرشيف SourceAP.standard

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LOS ANGELES — Worried about Earth-threatening asteroids? One of NASA's newest space telescopes has spotted 25,000 never-before-seen asteroids in just six months.

Ninety-five of those are considered "near Earth," but in the language of astronomy that means within 30 million miles. Luckily for us, none poses any threat to Earth anytime soon.

Called WISE for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the telescope completes its first full scan of the sky on Saturday and then begins another round of imaging.

What's special about WISE is its ability to see through impenetrable veils of dust, picking up the heat glow of objects that are invisible to regular telescopes.

"Most telescopes focus on the hottest and brightest objects in the universe," said Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "WISE is especially sensitive to seeing what's cool and dark, what you could call the stealth objects of the universe."

Mission team members are elated with the discoveries of the $320 million project, which launched in December. By the end of the year, researchers expect to have a cosmic census of millions of newfound objects that should help answer questions about how planets, stars and galaxies form.

Besides all those asteroids, WISE has also sighted 15 new comets. It has spied hundreds of potential brown dwarfs — stellar objects that are bigger than a planet but much smaller than a star — and confirmed the existence of 20 of them, including some of the coldest ever known.</BLOCKQUOTE>

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