Finding, Tracking and Characterizing Asteroids

What is NEOWISE?

The NEOWISE project is the asteroid-hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. Funded by NASA's Planetary Science Division, NEOWISE harvests measurements of asteroids and comets from the WISE images and provides a rich archive for searching WISE data for solar system objects.

WISE was launched in December 2009, and 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. The survey continued as NEOWISE for an additional four months using the two shortest wavelength detectors. The spacecraft was placed into hibernation in February 2011, after completing its search of the inner solar system.

During its primary mission, NEOWISE delivered infrared detections of more than 158,000 minor planets to the scientific community, including more than 34,000 new discoveries. NEOWISE data have been used to set limits on the numbers, orbits, sizes, and probable compositions of asteroids throughout our solar system, and enabled the discovery of the first known Earth Trojan asteroid.

NEOWISE Reactivation

NEOWISE has been brought out of hibernation to learn more about the population of near-Earth objects and comets that could pose an impact hazard to the Earth. During its multiyear survey in the 3.4 and 4.6 μm infrared bands, NEOWISE will rapidly characterize near-Earth objects (NEOs) and obtain accurate measurements of their diameters and albedos (how much light an object reflects). NEOWISE is equally sensitive to both light-colored asteroids and the optically dark objects that are difficult for ground-based observers to discover and characterize.

NEOWISE observations resumed in December 2013. Just six days after the survey start, NEOWISE discovered its first potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid, 2013 YP139.

The characteristics of and initial performance of the NEOWISE Reactivation mission are described in Mainzer et al. 2014, ApJ, 792, 30.

The Single-exposure image and extracted source information from the first seven years of NEOWISE observations were released on:

Diameters and albedos for asteroids detected by NEOWISE during the first seven years have been published by:

Current Status

NEOWISE survey observations are continuing in 2024.

As of March 2024 NEOWISE is 60% of the way through the 21st coverage of the full sky since the start of the Reactivation mission. Over 1.5 million infrared measurements have been made of 43,982 different solar system objects, including 1,575 NEOs and 283 comets.

The NEOWISE project has completed reprocessing all primary mission data to extend the search for asteroids and comets to fainter limits, and to take advantage of the improved photometric and astrometric calibrations available. These detections have been submitted to the Minor Planet Center and await ingesting. The Project has also delivered a preliminary catalog of physical properties for known minor planets to NASA's Planetary Data System, which will be updated at the end of the mission to include the improved photometry and astrometry from reprocessing, recent data from the NEOWISE Reactivation Survey and properties of objects measured in stacked observations.

About NEOWISE

The Principal Investigator for NEOWISE is Amy Mainzer of the University of Arizona. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages NEOWISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and carries out mission operations. The Space Dynamics Laboratory, Utah State University provided the science instrument. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. built the spacecraft. Science operations, data processing and archiving take place at IPAC at the California Institute of Technology.

When acknowledging the NEOWISE project, please cite Mainzer et al. 2011 ApJ 731, 53.