NASA has finally put the WISE Infrared Space Telescope into hibernation mode after ten years in space. The telescope will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere at the end of the year, it is reported on the agency's website.
WISE (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) entered Earth orbit on December 14, 2009, and until July 2010 surveyed the sky in the infrared range, observing distant galaxies, young stars, brown dwarfs, Solar System objects, and nebulae. The telescope then ran out of hydrogen, which, when frozen in a cryostat, cooled the detectors to very low temperatures, reducing interference, and the observations were terminated in 2011.
In 2013, the telescope came out of deep sleep mode, resuming the operation of two of the four instruments, and received a new name NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object WISE). Now the task of the telescope was to search for and study the properties of asteroids and comets whose trajectories may be near the Earth's orbit. These observations were carried out until the middle of 2024.
At around midnight on July 31, 2024, NEOWISE conducted the last scientific observations and took the 26886704th image of the sky in which the stars from the constellations fell. I'm Pechi. The field of view of the picture is about three times larger than the disk of the full Moon, in the lower right corner you can see the elliptical galaxy NGC 1339, which is 64 million light years from the Sun, and above the center you can see a binary star system with an orbital period of about a day. On August 8, after all the data was transmitted to Earth, the ground control center transmitted commands to the telescope board to cease operations and turn off the transmitter. At the end of the year, the telescope is expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up in it.
In 2028, NEOWISE will be replaced by the NEO Surveyor telescope, which is being developed by NASA. He will conduct a census of large asteroids and comets potentially dangerous for the Earth for several years.