In its first 25 days of operations, the newly reactivated NEOWISE
mission has detected 857 minor bodies in our solar system, including 22
near-Earth objects (NEOs) and four comets. Three of the NEOs are new
discoveries; all three are hundreds of meters in diameter and dark as
coal.
The mission has just passed its post-restart survey readiness review,
and the project has verified that the ability to measure asteroid
positions and brightness is as good as it was before the spacecraft
entered hibernation in early 2011. At the present rate, NEOWISE is
observing and characterizing approximately one NEO per day, giving
astronomers a much better idea of the objects’ sizes and compositions.
Out of the more than 10,500 NEOs that have been discovered to date,
only about 10 percent have had any physical measurements made of them;
the reactivated NEOWISE will more than double that number.
JPL 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.
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