[meteorite-list] NASA Mulls Waking WISE Space Telescope for Asteroid Hunt

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 16:43:06 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201308022343.r72Nh61K015821_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.space.com/22227-nasa-revive-wise-mission-asteroids.html

NASA Mulls Waking Space Telescope for Asteroid Hunt
by Dan Leone
Space News
August 02, 2013
 
WASHINGTON - NASA may wake the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
space telescope from a two-year hibernation to resume its NEOWISE asteroid
hunting mission for another three years, the head of the agency's Near-Earth
Object Observation Program said here Monday (July 29).

WISE launched in December 2009 and scanned for faraway comets, asteroids
and galaxies for about 10 months before it depleted its hydrogen coolant
in October 2010, rendering two of its four infrared detectors unusable.
Rather than shut the telescope down right away, NASA approved the NEOWISE
extended mission, which kept the observatory operating for another four
months looking for asteroids in our solar system.

Now, NASA's Planetary Science Division is hoping for a much longer extension,
which might be affordable even if Congress does not double the Near-Earth
Object Observation Program's $20 million budget in 2014, as the Obama
administration requested in April.

"I can afford it at $20 million, and certainly at $40 million," Lindley
Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program,
told members of the NASA Advisory Council's science committee at NASA
headquarters here.

A second extension would focus on near-Earth object (NEO) detection and
characterization - the determination of an asteroid's size, composition
and orbital peculiarities. WISE, a $320 million observatory built by Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., around an infrared telescope
supplied by Space Dynamics Laboratory of Logan, Utah, detected more than
30,000 asteroids during the four-month NEOWISE phase.

Johnson has mentioned the idea of a WISE restart before, most recently
during the Small Bodies Assessment Group and the Ball-hosted Target NEO-2
workshop, both of which took place here in early July. At the Small Bodies
meeting, Johnson spoke for the group in urging a WISE restart, noting
that "some urgency" was required. By 2017, Johnson said, the telescope's
sun-synchronous Earth orbit will decay past the point of being useful
for asteroid spotting. NASA, in its official response to the recommendation,
said it would consider a restart, provided funding was available.

Although Johnson told the National Advisory Council July 29 that funding
should indeed be available, he was short on specifics, and would not say
what a NEOWISE restart and three years of operations would cost.
Received on Fri 02 Aug 2013 07:43:06 PM PDT