NASA’s Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope NEOWISE Retires, Leaves Legacy

The NEOWISE mission, NASA’s asteroid-hunting space telescope, retired in August 2024 after over a decade of discovering, tracking, and characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs) —asteroids and comets that come close to Earth’s orbit. NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) began its life as WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), an infrared space telescope that launched in 2009, completed its original mission, and was put into hibernation in 2011. NASA reactivated it in 2013 as NEOWISE. Without a propulsion system to boost its orbit, NEOWISE is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in the coming months. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (unless otherwise noted)

What is said in the film

Five. Four. Three. Two one. We have ignition and liftoff of the Delta two rocket.

And was searching for stars and galaxies never seen before. I now declare Neowise decommissioned. What a great mission. What a great team. I can't say enough, about this team.

they all have ownership of their procedures and processes, and they make it happen. the science folks did a great job of, giving an overview of, how this all came about and some of the great science, that has been, discovered and analyzed to date. Neowise has taught us a lot about the small bodies in our solar system, the asteroids and the comets in particular. We've looked at the ratio of bright objects to dark objects. What I mean by that is some rocks are lighter colored, whereas others we now know are as dark as coal or printer toner.

If you've ever accidentally cracked open a cartridge and gotten it on your hands, really dark stuff. About 30 to 40% of the asteroids that get close to the Earth turn out to be made of this very, very dark substance. So we've learned that from Neowise. Today happens to be the day that we're placing our spacecraft into hibernation mode. So in other words, we've stopped collecting science data.

And now we're going to stop talking to it. That's because the orbit is getting low. And it's it's time to be done. We've learned a lot about how to find asteroids using a space telescope in real time, and we're going to apply that knowledge as we build the next one. So we're hard at work actually building the follow on mission to Neowise, which is called the near-Earth Object Surveyor mission.

And it's basically kind of taking the lessons that we've learned from Neowise and then kind of building a bigger, better, badder version of it when it comes to finding asteroids. A spacecraft. This has been my first opportunity to actually send the last command, and more than what was going through my mind. I was thinking about the people that started the mission, right? The people that had the reach back, the people that was so passionate with the science that they presented right to be associated with the mission at the time that comet Neowise that was discovered.

That was a great, great feeling to be a part of that. To see the press release, to see all of the various pictures, you know, that was released with the image in it, and to know that your team made that happen. That old saying, when one door closes, another one opens. And that's what we have today with the decommissioning of Neowise being a pathfinder for Neos, it opens the door to NEO Surveyor. Neowise has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system.

It produced things that people want to use that help us and are really helping us better understand our place in the universe. We observed over 150,000 objects in the solar system, measuring diameters for all of them and really helping us expand our database for the physical properties of asteroids and comets. Even though Neowise is ending, there's still going to be a future to tracking Earth objects because we still haven't found them all. So we will be launching another mission in 2027 called the New Earth Object Surveyor mission. And the point of this is to complete the survey that we started to use, all the lessons we learned from Wise and Neil Wise, and to do a full census of the hazardous asteroids out there.

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