WISE/NEOWISE

Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer

past Mission

Type

Space Telescope

Launch

Dec. 14, 2009

Objective

Search for near-Earth asteroids and comets

end of mission

July 31, 2024

A space telescope’s second act, NEOWISE was assigned to monitor asteroids and comets, especially those that might threaten Earth. Launched in December 2009 as WISE (the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), it scanned the distant universe until February 2011 – identifying the most luminous galaxies in the cosmos, finding millions of hidden black holes, and discovering the coolest class of stars. Then in late 2013, WISE was taken out of hibernation, repurposed, and renamed NEOWISE, for the Near-Earth Objects it would hunt. As expected, due to increased solar activity, NEOWISE reentered and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere at 8:49 p.m. EDT on November 1, 2024.

Featured Story

NASA’s NEOWISE Infrared Heritage Will Live On

NASA’s near-Earth-object-hunting mission NEOWISE is nearing its conclusion. But its work will carry on with NASA’s next-generation infrared mission: NEO…

Read the Story

NASA's NEOWISE Celebrates 10 Years

End of Mission Scheduled for July 31, 2024, as Orbit Decays

The asteroid- and comet-hunting infrared space telescope has gathered an impressive haul of observations, but it’s now at the mercy of the Sun, which is accelerating its demise. The Sun is entering a cycle of increased activity, with solar flares and coronal mass ejections heating up and expanding our atmosphere. The increased drag on Earth-orbiting satellites slows them down, and NEOWISE will eventually be unable to stay aloft.

An overhead illustration of our solar system shows the Sun as a bright dot in the center of the black background of space, surrounded by a half-dozen elliptical orbits. A green ellipse represents Earth's orbit. A blue one closely circles around that, while an orange one crosses the green orbit in two places.

Results from NASA's NEOWISE survey find that more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are closely aligned with the plane of our solar system than previous models suggested. Earth's orbit around the Sun is marked in green, the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, extending outward from the Sun, are gray. The blue orbit represents a typical near-Earth asteroid, while orange is a typical orbit for a PHA – which come within 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers) of Earth, and are larger than 330 feet (100 meters). NEOWISE has provided the best overall look at the PHA population yet, refining estimates of their numbers, sizes, types of orbits and potential hazards.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Extending Its Legacy as Earth's Watchdog

A Decade's Worth of Data from NEOWISE “Will Pay Dividends for Generations”

While this workhorse space telescope winds down its second career in planetary defense, it continues its long-duration survey of the universe, compiling a unique resource for future astronomers to make further discoveries.

Read About NEOWISE and Its Treasure Trove of Data

An image of asteroid Dinkinesh, at left, an asteroid with a slightly jagged surface and its two two binary satellites, at right, two small grey jagged orbs, taken from the Lucy spacecraft.

This image shows the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite as seen by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on Nov. 1, 2023, from a range of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 kilometers). An example of the ongoing, long-term contributions of WISE/NEOWISE, infrared data on Dinkinesh that WISE collected during its prime mission in 2010 was used to support the Lucy flyby, 13 years later.

NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL

Aug. 8, 2024

Farewell, NEOWISE

Watch WISE/NEOWSE mission team members sing the praises of the space telescope and its enduring contributions to science, and send the final “power off” command to the spacecraft. After more than a decade of discovering and tracking near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets that come close to Earth’s orbit — and before that an entirely separate career, mapping the universe around us, cataloging black holes, galaxies, and other bodies, NEOWISE is expected to re-enter the atmosphere and safely burn up in late 2024.

Learn More About the End of WISE/NEOWISE

What is WISE/NEOWISE?

NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft was an infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope active from December 2009 to February 2011. In 2013 the spacecraft was assigned a new mission as NEOWISE, to help find near-Earth asteroids and comets.

NEOWISE hunts near-Earth objects from low-Earth orbit
The spacecraft orbits Earth once every 95 minutes – 15 times per day

Nation	United States of America (USA)
Objective(s)	Low-Earth Orbit
Spacecraft	WISE/NEOWISE
Spacecraft Mass	1,457 pounds (661 kilograms)
Mission Design and Management	NASA / JPL
Launch Vehicle	Delta 2
Launch Date and Time	Dec. 14, 2009 \| 14:09 UT
Launch Site	Vandenberg Air Force Base, California (USA)
Scientific Instruments	Cryogenic Telescope with Four Megapixel Infrared Cameras

Key Dates

Dec. 14, 2009: Launch

January 2010 to February 2011: Primary mission

Feb. 17, 2011: Spacecraft placed in hibernation

Late 2013: Spacecraft reactivated, and assigned new mission as NEOWISE

June 30, 2021: NEOWISE gets a two-year mission extension

Dec. 13, 2023: The NEOWISE team celebrates the 10th anniversary of its second life as a planetary defender, while also announcing its impending end of mission, saying it will burn up in Earth's atmosphere by 2025

July 31, 2024: NASA officially ends NEOWISE mission, after more than a decade as our planet's watchdog for potentially threatening comets and asteroids

Aug. 8, 2024 (22:20 UTC): NEOWISE spacecraft decommissioned, placed into hibernation for the second — and last — time, ending its career as an active asteroid hunter

Nov. 1, 2024: NEOWISE reentered and burned up in the atmosphere

Selected Images From WISE/NEOWISE

Observed by NASA's WISE mission, this image shows the entire sky seen in infrared light. Against the black background of space, running horizontally through the center of the image and seen predominantly in cyan are the stars of the Milky Way. Patches of green and red around the edges of the cyan band represent interstellar dust. — This mosaic shows the entire sky imaged by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared light refers to wavelengths that are longer than those visible to the human eye. Many cosmic objects radiate infrared, including gas and dust clouds where stars form, and brown dwarfs.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Against a backdrop of very dark blue dotted with hundreds of points of light of varied size, brightness. and shades of cyan, four nebulous blobs – colored in shades of deep maroon and reddish orange – dominate the frame in a curved line extending from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. The two smaller blobs are nearest the corners, while the larger ones dominate the center, all of them with green streamers and jets and tendrils emanating from them, in shades ranging from deep blue-green to olive to light mint. The scene looks like an overhead view of four squished tomatoes hurled into a bioluminescent pool, with the water splashing up and out from the impact changing from blue to green as it shoots out. — NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission captured this mosaic of the Heart and Soul nebulae. Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The nebula to the right is the Heart, named after its resemblance to a human heart. To the left is the Soul nebula, also known as the Embryo nebula. WISE's infrared vision allows it to see into the cooler and dustier crevices of clouds like these, where gas and dust are just beginning to collect into new stars. These stars are less than a few million of years old – youngsters in comparison to our Sun, which is nearly 5 billion years old. Also visible near the bottom of this image are two galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. Both galaxies contain billions of stars and, at about 10 million light-years away, are well outside our Milky Way yet relatively close compared to most galaxies. Maffei 1 is the bluish elliptical object and Maffei 2 is the spiral galaxy.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Against a black space backdrop speckled in blue pinpoints of starlight, a spiral galaxy sits in the center of the image, tilted from upper left to lower right, anchored at the center by a large dot of white light. Around that are swirling rings of very bright and light green and golden yellow, with the outermost ring looking like an oval of golden glitter glued to black velvet. A fainter oval made by an emerald green cloud sits just outside the glitter ring. — The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is captured in full in this new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full moons, or five degrees across the sky. WISE used all four of its infrared detectors to capture this picture (3.4- and 4.6-micron light is colored blue; 12-micron light is green; and 22-micron light is red). Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by newborn, massive stars. Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, and is located 2.5 million light-years from our sun. It is close enough for telescopes to spy the details of its ringed arms of new stars and hazy blue backbone of older stars. Also seen in the mosaic are two satellite galaxies, known as M32, located just a bit above Andromeda to the left of center, and the fuzzy blue M110, located below the center of the great spiral arms. These satellites are the largest of several that are gravitationally bound to Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy is larger than our Milky Way and contains more stars, but the Milky Way is thought to perhaps have more mass due to its larger proportion of a mysterious substance called dark matter. Both galaxies belong to our so-called Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies, most of which are tiny dwarf systems. In its quest to map the whole sky, WISE will capture the entire Local Group.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

At the center of the image, a small glowing yellow ball is followed by what looks like a red-orange jet of flame extending symetrically behind it, toward the right and off the edge of the frame. Extending from the front of the yellow nucleus is a thin red-orange line, looking like a laser beam going off to the left and out of frame, in a direct line with the flame-like tail. Behind the comet is a star field, with the blackness of space dotted with points of light, colored light cyan and in various sizes. The exception is a few dots shining bright red – only five are easily visible. — This image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) features comet 65P/Gunn. Comets are balls of dust and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. As a comet approaches the sun, it is heated and releases gas and dust from its surface, which are blown back by the solar wind into a long, spectacular tail. Comet 65P/Gunn's tail is seen here in red trailing off to the right of the comet's nucleus (near the center of the image).
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA WISE spacecraft. Euphrosyne is quite dark in visible light, but glows brightly at infrared wavelengths. — The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA's WISE spacecraft. WISE obtained the images used to create this view over a period of about a day around May 17, 2010, during which it observed the asteroid four times. Because WISE (renamed NEOWISE in 2013) is an infrared telescope, it senses heat from asteroids. Euphrosyne is quite dark in visible light, but glows brightly at infrared wavelengths. This view is a composite of images taken at four different infrared wavelengths: 3.4 microns (color-coded blue), 4.6 microns (cyan), 12 microns (green) and 22 microns (red). The moving asteroid appears as a string of red dots because it is much cooler than the distant background stars. Stars have temperatures in the thousands of degrees, but the asteroid is cooler than room temperature. Thus the stars are represented by shorter wavelength (hotter) blue colors in this view, while the asteroid is shown in longer wavelength (cooler) reddish colors. The WISE spacecraft was put into hibernation in 2011 upon completing its goal of surveying the entire sky in infrared light. WISE cataloged three quarters of a billion objects, including asteroids, stars and galaxies. In August 2013, NASA decided to reinstate the spacecraft on a mission to find and characterize more asteroids. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19645
NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's NEOWISE mission detected comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring on July 28, 2014, less than three months before this comet's close flyby of Mars on Oct. 19. NEOWISE took multiple images of the comet, combined here so that the comet is seen in four different positions relative to the background stars. The image also includes, near the upper right corner, a view of radio galaxy Fornax A (NGC1316). NEOWISE previously observed comet Siding Spring on Jan. 16, 2014 (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17833). NEOWISE is part of a team of observation resources to characterize the comet for the encounter with our neighboring planet. At the time of the July 28 observations, the comet was 144 million miles (1.55 astronomical units) from NEOWISE and 175 million miles (1.88 astronomical units) from the sun. The observations help constrain estimates of dust and gas production as this comet from the outer solar system approaches Mars. NGC1316 is a famous radio galaxy, the fourth-brightest radio source in the sky at 1400 megahertz. It is in the Fornax galaxy cluster, which also includes two other galaxies visible in the image. NGC1316 has an active nucleus, as evidenced by a radio jet and a compact nuclear gas disk. It is thought to be the remnant of a merger between a large elliptical galaxy and a smaller spiral galaxy about 100 million years ago. For more information about comet Siding Spring, see http://mars.nasa.gov/comets/sidingspring/. More information on NEOWISE is online at http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., 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.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Supernova Remnant RCW 86 — This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova. X-ray images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's (European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova. Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in yellow and red, reveal dust radiating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero, warm by comparison to normal dust in our Milky Way galaxy.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO & ESA; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Williams (NCSU)

The locations of brown dwarfs discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and mapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are shown in this diagram. The view is from a vantage point about 100 light-years away from the sun, looking back toward the constellation Orion. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — The locations of brown dwarfs discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and mapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are shown in this diagram. The view is from a vantage point about 100 light-years away from the sun, looking back toward the constellation Orion.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

A loop of star images from WISE. — A previously cataloged brown dwarf named WISE 0855?0714 shows up as a moving orange dot in this loop of WISE images spanning five years. By viewing movies like this, anyone can help discover more of these objects.
NASA/WISE

A witch appears to be screaming out into space in this new image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch. Astronomers say the billowy clouds of the nebula, where baby stars are brewing, are being lit up by massive stars. Dust in the cloud is being hit with starlight, causing it to glow with infrared light, which was picked up by WISE's detectors. The Witch Head nebula is estimated to be hundreds of light-years away in the Orion constellation, just off the famous hunter's knee. WISE was recently "awakened" to hunt for asteroids in a program called NEOWISE. The reactivation came after the spacecraft was put into hibernation in 2011, when it completed two full scans of the sky, as planned. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech **NASA image use policy.** **NASA Goddard Space Flight Center** enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission. **Follow us on Twitter** **Like us on Facebook** **Find us on Instagram**

This image of a dying star throwing a cosmic tantrum combines observations from three space telescopes – Spitzer, GALEX (the Galaxy Evolution Explorer), and WISE (the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). The Helix nebula, 650 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, is typical of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets, but are actually the remains of stars that once resembled our Sun. After they burn through their fuel, these stars die, puffing off their outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core called a white dwarf. Intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf heats up the expelled layers of gas, which shine brightly in the infrared. GALEX captured the ultraviolet light pouring out of this system, shown throughout the nebula in blue, Spitzer recorded the infrared signature of the dust and gas, colored yellow, and WISE captured the extended field beyond the nebula in infrared, shown here in green and red. The white dwarf star itself is a tiny white pinprick right at the center of the nebula.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Comet C/2013 UQ4 (Catalina) looked like an asteroid when NASA's NEOWISE team first observed it on Dec. 31, 2013. By the time of this image, on July 7, 2014, the target appeared to be a highly active comet one day past perihelion.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

A heavily pixelated image composed of a multitude of tiny green and red squares features a bright white dot at the center, surrounded by a halo of bright pink pixels. — NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft (the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) first observed Comet NEOWISE on Valentine's Day, 2014. This heat-sensitive infrared image was made by combining six exposures taken by the NEOWISE mission of the newly discovered comet. The image shows 1/20th of a degree of sky on a side, or about 155,000 miles (250,000 kilometers) at the comet's distance. The NEOWISE mission searches for asteroids and comets using two infrared wavelength channels. The shorter wavelength, at 3.4 microns [or millionths of a meter], is mapped to cyan and the longer wavelength, at 4.6 microns [or millionths of a meter], is shown in red. The tail of the comet NEOWISE extends about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) to the right in the image.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

A star-studded space background shows a multitude of stars as various-sized dots in cyan, overlaid with a wash of bright olive and golden yellow swirls, palest in the center and heaviest at the left, bottom, and right edges of the frame. At center a line of a dozen tiny golden dots marches horizontally across the image. — NASA's WISE space telescope (the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) captured more than 100 asteroids in this view in March 2010, during its primary all-sky survey, before WISE was put into hibernation in 2011. In August 2014, the mission was revived to hunt more asteroids and other Near-Earth Objects, and renamed NEOWISE. Not all of the asteroids are easy to see, but some stand out as a series of dots. Each dot in a track shows one asteroid, captured at different times as it marched across the sky. The asteroid at center left is called (2415) Ganesa. Clusters of stars can also be seen; for example, NGC 2158 glitters like a jeweled brooch at center right. There are about 2,500 stars in this view, which is about 30 light-years across. Clouds of gas and dust surround the region, visible only in the infrared light that NEOWISE observes.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

A black background with about a dozen scattered points of blue and pink light is dominated in the center by a deep yellow, teardrop shape in the middle, pointing down, with three red-lined concentric ovals emanating from the teardrop's glowing white core. — This image shows an expanded view of comet C/2006 W3 (Christensen), observed by the WISE spacecraft on April 20, 2010, as it traveled through the constellation Sagittarius. Comet Christensen was nearly 370 million miles (600 million kilometers) from Earth at the time, and the extent of the dust, about a tenth of a degree across in this image, was about two-thirds the diameter of the Sun. The red contours outline the gas emission that WISE observed in the 4.6 micron infrared wavelength – carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The strength of the 4.6 micron signal indicates more than half a metric ton per second of CO or CO2 was emitted from this comet during the observations.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Against a fuzzy star field of bright white points of light, three glowing red dots march across the frame at center, heading from lower left toward upper right. — Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE appears as a string of fuzzy red dots in this composite of several heat-sensitive infrared images taken by NASA's NEOWISE space telescope (the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) on March 27, 2020. The comet was discovered using these images to track its motion across the sky against the backdrop of stationary stars and galaxies. These images have been processed such that cyan colors represent NEOWISE's 3.4-micron channel (a wavelength of infrared light approximately seven times longer than the green light that humans see), while red colors represent the NEOWISE 4.6-micron channel. The comet's extended halo, or coma, of gas and dust was already apparent in the discovery images. The comet appears much redder than the background stars and galaxies because it is much cooler and therefore emits more light at longer wavelengths.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

In Depth: WISE/NEOWISE

NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft was successfully launched to near-Earth orbit on Dec. 14, 2009, to serve as an infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope.

WISE surveyed the full sky in four infrared wavelength bands (3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 μm) until the frozen hydrogen cooling the telescope was depleted in September 2010. During its run, it discovered the most luminous galaxy in the universe, shining with the light of more than 300 trillion suns, undermined theories about the existence of a hidden Planet X lurking in the farthest reaches of our solar system, uncovered millions of hidden black holes, and spied elusive brown dwarfs, peculiar and cold objects that are neither stars nor planets. WISE even discovered brown dwarfs' even more obscure cousins – Y dwarfs, the coldest class of star-like entities, with temperatures as cool as the human body. All these and more are among the three-quarters of a billion objects WISE cataloged during the two full-sky scans it completed, mapping the universe in every direction surrounding Earth. But without the hydrogen coolant, the telescope began to warm up – at one point reaching minus 334 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 203 degrees Celsius) – and its own infrared signature threatened to drown out the scant heat detectable from objects billions of light-years away.

The spacecraft was placed into hibernation in February 2011, having completed its primary astrophysics mission.

WISE/NEOWISE: Watching the Universe As It Changes Around Us

Scanning the sky anew every six months, the infrared space telescope has gathered more than 10 years of observations and nearly two dozen all-sky images. Combining these views enables a long-term analysis and a deeper understanding of the universe, giving astronomers the opportunity to see objects, such as stars and black holes, as they move and change over time. The videos here include previously hidden brown dwarfs, a feeding black hole, a dying star, a star-forming region, and a mysteriously brightening star.

Learn More

In late 2013, the spacecraft was assigned a new mission by NASA’s Planetary Science Division. Now called NEOWISE, the spacecraft began helping NASA identify and describe near-Earth objects (NEOs). NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood. Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) are asteroids that could one day threaten Earth. Near-Earth objects are classified as PHAs based on their size and how closely they can approach Earth's orbit.

NEOWISE went back to work in December 2013, and just six days later it had discovered its first potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid: 2013 YP139.

The image shows a star field in space, hundreds of scattered dots of greenish white, of varying sizes and brightnesses, against a black background. Lined up horizontally in the upper third of the image are six evenly spaced small red dots, with blue circles dran around each to set them off. A small, blue-lined box at the bottom of the image shows a magnified view of one of the red dots, and the stars surrounding it.

This composite picture shows the movement of the first near-Earth asteroid discovered by NEOWISE (NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), after the spacecraft came out of hibernation in December 2013. The red dots show the asteroid 2013 YP139 moving across the sky; the inset shows a zoomed-in view of one of the detections of 2013 YP139. It was discovered by NEOWISE on Dec. 29, 2013. The mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars. The image is about 1.5 degrees across. Asteroid 2013 YP139 was traveling across the sky at about 3.2 degrees per day when these images were taken. For reference, the full moon is about 0.5 degree across.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

On June 30, 2021 – International Asteroid Day – NASA announced it was extending the NEOWISE mission.

“At NASA, we’re always looking up, surveying the sky daily to find potential hazards and exploring asteroids to help unlock the secrets of the formation of our solar system,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Using ground-based telescopes, over 26,000 near-Earth asteroids have already been discovered, but there are many more to be found. We’ll enhance our observations with space-based capabilities like NEOWISE and the future, much more capable NEO Surveyor, to find the remaining unknown asteroids more quickly, and identify potentially hazardous asteroids and comets before they are a threat to us here on Earth.”

NEOWISE has provided an estimate of the size of more than 1,850 NEOs, helping us better understand our nearest solar-system neighbors.

“NEOWISE provides a unique and critical capability in our global mission of planetary defense, by allowing us to rapidly measure the infrared emission and more accurately estimate the size of hazardous asteroids as they are discovered,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer and head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Extending NEOWISE’s mission highlights not only the important work that is being done to safeguard our planet, but also the valuable science that is being collected about the asteroids and comets further out in space.”

As of February 2024, NEOWISE had made more than 1.5 million infrared measurements of 43,926 different solar system objects, including 1,571 near-Earth objects and 282 comets, and had completed 45% of the scanning for its 21st full-sky map of the universe around us.

Among its many accomplishments after its reactivation, NEOWISE also discovered Comet NEOWISE, which was named after the mission and dazzled observers worldwide in 2020.

Comet NEOWISE appears in a sky streaked with purple and green aurora

Comet NEOWISE is visible in an aurora-filled sky in this photo by citizen scientist Donna Lach, a NASA Aurorasaurus Ambassador. The photo was taken early on July 14, 2020, in western Manitoba, Canada. The comet was named for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope, which discovered the icy visitor on March 27, 2020. It was one of 34 comets the mission found through early 2024, while hunting celestial objects that could threaten Earth.

Donna Lach

The NEOWISE telescope’s replacement, the next-generation NEO Surveyor, is currently scheduled to launch in 2028, and will greatly expand on what we have learned, and continue to learn, from NEOWISE.

“NEOWISE has taught us a lot about how to find, track, and characterize Earth-approaching asteroids and comets using a space-based infrared telescope,” said Amy Mainzer, the NEOWISE principal investigator. “The mission serves as an important precursor for carrying out a more comprehensive search for these objects using the new telescope we’re building, the NEO Surveyor.” Mainzer is also the lead of the NEO Surveyor mission.

The NEOWISE project is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a division of Caltech, and by the University of Arizona, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

Key Resources

The NEOWISE Project at Caltech
Science operations, data processing, and archiving for WISE/NEOWISE take place at IPAC at the California Institute of Technology.
The University of Arizona NEOWISE Page
Hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in the university's College of Science.
Comet and Near-Earth Asteroid Discoveries
Details and statistics for WISE/NEOWISE from the JPL Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
National Space Science Data Center Master Catalog
Information about the WISE/NEOWISE launch, orbit, telecommunications, experiments, and data collections.
WISE News from UCLA’s Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics
An archive of mission milestones, dating back to the WISE launch on Dec. 13, 2009.
NEO Observations Program
Sponsors efforts worldwide to track near-Earth objects, determine their features and composition, and study ways to defelct or mitigate them, for NASA’s Planetary Defense Program.

neowise successor

NEO Surveyor

Building on the success of NEOWISE, and scheduled to launch no later than June 2028, NASA's NEO Surveyor will be the first spacecraft created specifically to find large numbers of hazardous asteroids and comets. As it scans the solar system, NEO Surveyor's sensitive infrared detectors will let it track the most challenging-to-find near-Earth objects. For example, dark asteroids and comets don't reflect much visible light, but will glow in the infrared spectrum as they’re heated by sunlight. In addition, NEO Surveyor will be able to find asteroids that approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, as well as ones both leading and trailing our planet's orbit, where they are typically obscured by the glare of sunlight; all of these are threats that larger ground-based observatories could miss.

Learn More about NEO Surveyor

In this illustration showing NEO Surveyor, NASA's next-generation near-Earth object hunter, the spacecraft floats in an infrared starfield containing stars, star clusters, gas, and dust.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona