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NEOWISE Opens its Eyes

Dec. 19, 2013
This is one of the first images captured by the revived NEOWISE mission, after more than two years of hibernation. It shows a patch of sky in the constellation Canes Venatici, or the Hunting Dogs.

This is one of the first images captured by the revived NEOWISE mission, after more than two years of hibernation. It shows a patch of sky in the constellation Canes Venatici, or the Hunting Dogs. The galaxy seen near the center is NGC 4111, the largest member of a small group of galaxies located 50 million light-years away. The galaxy is similar in brightness to our Milky Way galaxy, but with a diameter of 70,000 light-years, it is slightly smaller. NGC 4111's core contains a supermassive black hole actively feeding off surrounding gas and dust.

NEOWISE originated as the WISE mission, which was put into hibernation in 2011 upon completing its goal of surveying the entire sky in infrared light. WISE cataloged three quarters of a billion objects, including asteroids, stars and galaxies. In August, 2013, NASA decided to reinstate the spacecraft on a mission to find and characterize more asteroids.

JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.

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