After over 10 years of service tracking celestial objects near and far, NASA’s NEOWISE satellite has sent its final image home before going gently into that good night.
The star-studded infrared photo of the Fornax constellation was sent on August 1, and is the last of the 26,886,704 pictures NEOWISE took during the course of over 10 years of service. On Thursday, the space agency sent a final command to the telescope, telling it to shut down its transmitter.
NEOWISE launched in 2009, tasked with scanning the sky’s infrared signals. It was able to see far off galaxies, stars, and white dwarfs with greater sensitivity than previous instruments. Unfortunately, within a few months, the satellite ran out of coolant, which was essential for keeping its internal heat from interfering with its instruments. Despite this setback, the telescope was then assigned to survey the asteroid belts in our solar system.
NASA placed NEOWISE into hibernation in February 2011, but the spacecraft was reactivated in 2013 and assigned a new mission: mapping out 44,000 objects within our solar system. It detected 215 near-Earth objects and 25 new comets. Along the way, it played an integral part in NASA’s fledgling efforts to detect objects that could be on a collision course with Earth.
“The NEOWISE mission has been an extraordinary success story as it helped us better understand our place in the universe by tracking asteroids and comets that could be hazardous for us on Earth,” according to a NASA statement.
NASA announced the telescope’s impending retirement in December. An uptick in solar activity led to the Earth’s atmosphere heating up and expanding, creating increased atmospheric drag. That meant a decrease in NEOWISE’s altitude. The decision to end the mission was made because NEOWISE is approaching a point where its orbit will be too low to send back usable data. The satellite will soon burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA won’t be without eyes in space looking for potentially hazardous objects for long. The Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) is scheduled for launch in September, 2027.
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