NEOWISE: Legacy of NASA’s Asteroid-Hunting Telescope

The NEOWISE mission, NASA’s asteroid-hunting space telescope, is retiring in summer 2024 after over a decade of discovering, tracking, and characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs) — asteroids and comets that come close to Earth’s orbit. Without a propulsion system to boost its orbit, NEOWISE, which is short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in the coming months. In this video, mission leaders explain how NEOWISE has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system, better prepared us to predict potential impact events, and paved the way for a new mission: NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor. Originally launched in 2009 as WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), the telescope completed its primary mission to conduct an all-sky survey in the infrared spectrum. The spacecraft detected asteroids, stars, and some of the faintest galaxies in space, and then was put into hibernation in 2011. NASA re-awakened it in 2013, launching its second career and giving rise to its modified name, NEOWISE. On Aug. 8, 2024, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will send a command to once again put the spacecraft into hibernation before its re-entry, expected in late 2024 or early 2025. For more information on the NEOWISE mission, visit: science.nasa.gov/mission/neowise For NEOWISE data, visit: neowise.ipac.caltech.edu Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; WISE-NEOWISE movies compiled by Dan Caselden; WISE imagery: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/Judy Schmidt; 10 years of NEOWISE data animation: IPAC/Caltech/University of Arizona; select asteroid animations from NASA Eyes on Asteroids; asteroid 2014 HQ124 radar imagery: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arecibo Observatory/USRA/NSF; Orion Nebula: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech; International Space Station footage: NASA Johnson Space Center; comet NEOWISE images: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/Brendan Gallagher, and NASA/Bill Dunford

What is said in the film

NEOWISE is coming, at long last, to an end. If you're really lucky, your spacecraft will last far longer than you designed it for. In our case, we are many years now into a six-month mission, so we've been really lucky. The NEOWISE mission began with the WISE mission WISE was a mission. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, to study the astrophysical sky, to look for the brightest galaxies in the universe and the closest and coldest stars in our local solar neighborhood.

And along the way, we happened to be good at seeing asteroids and comets. So after the original WISE mission shut down, it was put into hibernation at the beginning of 2011. And then in late 2013, we woke it up, and lo and behold, it was doing great and it was ready for a new mission looking for asteroids and comets, particularly those that come close to Earth, called near-Earth objects. So we renamed the spacecraft NEOWISE in honor of its ability to find and characterize near-Earth objects. 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.

On one hand, it was an exploratory science mission, but on the other hand, there's a really practical purpose to it. We'd really like to know how often the Earth can get hit by asteroids and comets. And this has helped us understand that. There are so many favorite moments with this project. We've seen all kinds of wonderful things.

We've been able to do a lot. So the NEOWISE mission right now is coming to the end of its life. We don't have any onboard propulsion, so we can't change the orbit. We can't lift the spacecraft higher away from the Earth. The Earth's atmosphere is gradually dragging the spacecraft in.

As NEOWISE falls into a thicker and thicker atmosphere, its behavior changes in ways that make it a little bit harder to operate. And so it's best if we put it to sleep before it actually reenters and burns up. And pretty soon it will enter the atmosphere, which means it's going to turn into the thing we've been looking for all this time. It's going to become a shooting star, and that'll be the end. Well, even though NEOWISE is ending, there's still going to be a future to tracking near-Earth objects because we still haven't found them all.

We're also in the process of building a new space telescope. It's called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, and its goal is to find and characterize the objects that can impact the Earth. NEOWISE has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system. It produced things that help us better understand our place in the universe. That we made an important contribution to humanity's understanding of our place — that's what I hold in my heart.

NEOWISE, thanks for all the great data and all the great times. As a scientist, we could not have asked for anything more.

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