page_title: Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
section_title: NEOWISE (post-hibernation)
hierarchical_section_title: Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer / History / NEOWISE (post-hibernation)
caption_attribution_description: English: An artist’s rendition of 2016 WF9 as it passes Jupiter’s orbit inbound toward the sun. 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 &amp; Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, 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, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.
context_page_description: Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is a NASA infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope launched in December 2009, and placed in hibernation mode in February 2011. It was re-activated in 2013. WISE discovered thousands of minor planets and numerous star clusters. Its observations also supported the discovery of the first Y Dwarf and Earth trojan asteroid.
  WISE performed an all-sky astronomical survey with images in 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 μm wavelength range bands, over ten months using a 40 cm diameter infrared telescope in Earth orbit. After its hydrogen coolant depleted, a four-month mission extension called NEOWISE was conducted to search for near-Earth objects such as comets and asteroids using its remaining capability.
  The All-Sky data including processed images, source catalogs and raw data, was released to the public on March 14, 2012, and is available at the Infrared Science Archive. In August 2013, NASA announced it would reactivate the WISE telescope for a new three-year mission to search for asteroids that could collide with Earth.
context_section_description: The post-hibernation NEOWISE mission was anticipated to discover 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects and to learn more about the characteristics of 2,000 known asteroids. Few objects smaller than 100 m (330 ft) in diameter were detected by NEOWISE's automated detection software, known as the WISE Moving Object Processing Software (WMOPS), because it requires five or more detections to be reported. The average albedo of asteroids larger than 100 meters discovered by NEOWISE is 0.14 .
  The telescope was turned on again in 2013, and by December 2013 the telescope had cooled down enough and was able to resume observations. Between then and May 2017, the telescope made almost 640,000 detections of over 26,000 previously known objects including asteroids and comets. In addition, it discovered 416 new objects and about a quarter of those were near-Earth objects classification.
  As of May 2018, WISE / NEOWISE statistics lists a total of 290 near-Earth objects (NEOs), including 2016 WF9 and C/2016 U1, discovered by the spacecraft:
  262 NEAs (subset of NEOs)
  47 PHAs (subset of NEAs)
  28 comets
  Of the 262 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), 47 of them are considered potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), a subset of the much larger family of NEOs, but particularly more likely to hit Earth and cause significant destruction. NEOs can be divided into NECs (comets only) and NEAs (asteroids only), and further into subcategories such as Atira or Apohele asteroids, Aten asteroids, Apollo asteroids, Amor asteroids and the potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs).
caption: Concept art for 2016 WF9, discovered by WISE under the NEOWISE mission
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