NEOWISE: A Celestial Farewell as It Blazes Through Earth’s Skies

NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope safely resumed burning in Earth’s atmosphere on November 2, officially ending its 15-year mission to explore the universe and protect Earth.

The mission team ordered the telescope’s scientific work to end on July 31. NEOWISE image 26,886,704 shows portions of the constellation Fornax in the Southern Hemisphere. And it is the last image taken by this space telescope.

NEOWISE slowly descends into a lower orbit and encounters resistance from Earth’s denser atmosphere, which results from various phenomena of the sun occurring frequently during Solar Maximum just in time before it was confirmed that NEOWISE had returned to burning in Earth’s atmosphere on November 2 at 7:49 am Thailand time. Over the ocean off the west coast of Australia.

NASA Deputy Administrator Nicola Fox said: “While we are sad to see NEOWISE’s groundbreaking success in helping us understand our place in the universe, it monitors the presence of potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids and comets. Must finish the mission. But we are excited for future discovery missions as NEOWISE lays the foundation for the next generation of Earth-protecting space telescopes.”

The space telescope was launched on December 14, 2009, as WISE, or Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, to record wide-angle images of the sky in the infrared spectrum. Before being sent into hibernation in 2011 when the cooling system was exhausted. As a result, heat waves interfere with the exploration of objects in the infrared wave range.

NASA decided to renew its mission in 2013 and renamed it NEOWISE with a new mission to protect the Earth by mapping the sky from Earth orbit. It reveals the location of more than 44,000 near-Earth objects, including asteroids and comets, including the famous 2020 comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), which will not return to the inner solar system for the next 6,800 years.

The next Earth-protecting space telescope, called NEO Surveyor, will be launched in September 2027 to succeed the NEOWISE mission, which ends.