WISE, a mission that will find ALL the neighbours Options

[ElkGroveDan]

11,000 of the NEOs and asteroids it has observed are new.

[nprev]

Yeah...what Dan said!!!

That's absolutely mind-boggling. I was expecting a few hundred, maybe a thousand.

[ElkGroveDan]

Does anyone know what the statistically predicted numbers of various classes of objects were, and how those numbers are shaking out thus far? Or will we have to wait for the "paper?"

[Stu]

If we could see, with our own eyes, all the crap flying about Out There, we'd never dare look at the sky, would we..?

[alan]

WISE satellite already spots two brown dwarfs

One of the brown dwarfs, dubbed WISE 2, appears to be as cold as any that are known. It may even be colder, Wright said, than the brown dwarfs recently found by the UKIDSS survey, which are estimated to be in the neighborhood of 500 Kelvin, but the exact temperature of WISE 2 is uncertain (as are the temperatures of the UKIDSS objects). WISE 1 is a bit warmer, Wright said: "We think this is about an 800-Kelvin object."

Wright later said that whereas the spectra of WISE 1 and WISE 2 are unambiguous, the spacecraft has found many more objects that may also be brown dwarfs. Confirmation of those will await follow-up observations, which the group has proposed on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Distances to the two new brown dwarfs are not known, Wright added

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/pos...o-br-2010-05-27

[centsworth_II]

"....Wright said, than the brown dwarfs recently found by the UKIDSS survey, which are estimated to be in the neighborhood of 500 Kelvin...."

Just the right place to bake a pizza!

[Greg Hullender]

I'm surprised they don't have estimated distances to the Brown Dwarves. Much like Red Dwarves, I'd expect they must be fairly close to be visible at all, even by WISE.

--Greg

[nprev]

Perhaps there hasn't been enough time yet to get good parallax observations on any of them?

[brellis]

then, why is the mission nearly complete?

[nprev]

Good point. We don't know when they were identified, though, nor if there have been any follow-up observations (presumably from ground-based assets.)

Given the limited operational lifetime of WISE I'll bet that they're in straight data acquisition mode all the way to the end, and sifting through the torrent is secondary at this point. There's probably no chance to take another look at almost anything.

[stevesliva]

Good point. We don't know when they were identified, though, nor if there have been any follow-up observations (presumably from ground-based assets.)

Something actually mentioned [warm] Spitzer would be used to look at the Brown Dwarves.

[Greg Hullender]

There's probably no chance to take another look at almost anything.

Except that asteroid observations have to be followed up on almost immediately. It does seem they're doing that.

I was interested that they hadn't found anything so dim in other frequencies that it couldn't be observed by some other instrument. That certainly suggests we ought to be able to get parallax measurements within a few months.

--Greg

[Holder of the Tw...]

There have been some cases of follow up observations of asteroids being made months later (blast from the past), and a few cases of WISE making all the observations necessary by itself to designate an asteroid (WISE only). Also a very few cases of finding an asteroid only with WISE data months after the observations (2010 AR85 is an example). Here is the link to the asteroid discovery page at the WISE website.

WISE asteroid discoveries Note that this is mostly for NEAs.

For parallax observations, WISE fortunately is always observing at right angles to the sun, so that even objects in the ecliptic plane will be observed at maximum angular displacement six months later. During the nine month mission about half the sky will be observed by WISE alone with parallax data points. Unfortunately, in most cases you will also need a data point at one year in order to subtract out the proper motion, which in most cases dwarfs the parallax. The mission will end after nine months. Follow ups will have to be with some other telescope.

Large proper motion itself might be the main indicator they are looking for, in order to find nearby objects (nearby in this case meaning stellar neighborhood).

A person at WISE outreach was kind enough to inform me that they can determine positional accuracy for stars to better than half an arc second. This is in line with the residuals I see listed on the asteroid reports from the minor planet center. So anything closer than, say, five or six light years should produce a measurable parallax, albeit with a fairly large error.

[Greg Hullender]

I see WISE is past 95% coverage now, so definitely into the home stretch. I also noticed that they managed to analyze the blob around the Galactic Core which had given them some troubles earlier. It looks as though they had some sort of outage a month or so ago, meaning there's a small stripe that they missed. Since that's in the last half of the sky, that means it won't get reimaged on the second pass. Pity, but it's still pretty impressive.

I note WISE is up to 97 reported discoveries now.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/wise/

Including 13 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA). I don't see Torino numbers on any of these, so I'd guess there hasn't been time to analyze their orbits thoroughly.

--Greg

[Greg Hullender]

With no special announcement, it seems WISE has completed its sky survey--minus those strips where the camera apparently went offline or something.

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/sky_coverage.html

If wonder if there will be any big surprises during the next part of the mission, perhaps from noticing that something moved unexpectedly.

--Greg