NASA's NEOWISE Telescope Burns In Earth's Atmosphere

The appearance of the NEOWISE space telescope (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA The NEOWISE mission, short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, owned by NASA officially ended on November 2. The spacecraft has entered Earth's atmosphere and caught fire there.

NASA revealed that the NEOWISE de-orbit process is in accordance with their calculations. Although NASA has lost the probe, the US space agency will continue to explore asteroids and comets with the latest observational technologies.

According to NASA, the NEOWISE mission went well for nearly 15 years. Since it was first launched under the name WISE, the space telescope has successfully mapped the sky, tracked astronomical objects approaching Earth, and cataloged black holes and galaxies.

All the data NEOWISE has collected over a decade has helped hundreds of thousands of amateur scientists in citizen science projects, such as the Milky Way Project, Disk Detective, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors, and Exosteroids.

"Although the spacecraft is no longer orbiting, there is still much work to be done. WISE/NEOWISE data contains trillions of astronomical source detections, enough to create new projects and discoveries over the years to come," NASA said.

So far, there have been more than 55 scientific publications made by amateur scientists using NEOWISE data. This publication records the discovery of auroras in brown dwarfs, oldest white dwarfs with disks, low-mass hyperspeed stars, to interplanetary collision detections.

Although NEOWISE caught fire in the atmosphere recently, the plane ended its mission last July. The NEOWISE engine has been turned off since August 8 to enter the second hibernating period as well as preparations for de-orbit.