By: Claire Zhou

On Thursday, August 8, a group of scientists and engineers based in California accidentally captured a photograph of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) while trying to get a clean shot of Fornax, a constellation in the Southern Hemisphere.

NEOWISE is a telescope that has spent the last 11 years orbiting earth, searching for any asteroids or comets that could threaten the safety of our planet. Only last month NEOWISE was put to rest.
Amy Mainzer, astronomer at UCLA and principal investigator for NEOWISE says, “This was the little space telescope that could,” she also stated “We were really lucky to get to do this work.”

In 2009, NEOWISE’s predecessor was launched, called WISE. For over a year WISE observed distant objects within our universe, such as supermassive black holes, brown dwarfs, and dying stars. Although WISE was never intended to examine objects close to earth, it occurred to scientists that it was a good tool for looking at asteroids as well.

During its time in orbit, WISE discovered Trojan, the first asteroid to share an orbit with earth. Dr. Mainzer and her colleagues took their findings to NASA and suggested that they extend the mission by a few months, with a new focus of detecting asteroids and NASA agreed and the telescope was given a new name, NEOWISE.

For the next few months, NEOWISE studied the solar system’s largest asteroid belt until the space agency temporarily shut down its systems. In 2013 NEOWISE was restored and spent the next 11 years analyzing over 44,000 objects in our solar system.

On July 31, mission specialists decided to end NEOWISE’s journey, due to its orbital descent which affects its ability to collect accurate data. Only eight days later, the team shut off NEOWISE’s data transmitter for good. The telescope is predicted to disintegrate in earth’s atmosphere by the end of this year.

NASA is currently working on the next planetary defender, called Near-Earth Object Surveyor. It’s expected to launch in 2027 at the earliest. Unlike NEOWISE before it, NEO Surveyor will be designed for the sole purpose of detecting any potential threats close to earth.