After greater than a decade of looking for asteroids and comets, the times of NASA’s NEOWISE mission are officially numbered.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California (JPL) just announced that the NEOWISE mission will come to an end inside just just a few years. JPL mission planners expect that solar activity will drag the space telescope out of orbit, and to a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere, by 2025.
“The mission has planned for today a protracted time,” Joseph Masiero, a planetary scientist on the California Institute of Technology and NEOWISE’s deputy principal investigator, said in a statement.
NEOWISE is the present mission of the WISE (“Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer”) spacecraft, which launched in December 2009 to map the sky in infrared light, spotting distant stars and galaxies in addition to near-Earth comets and asteroids. But WISE was at all times operating on limited time, and, in October 2010, the spacecraft ran out of the hydrogen it needed to chill its 4 infrared detectors.
That wasn’t the top, nonetheless. NASA decided to shut down two of WISE’s 4 detectors and refocus its observations on near-Earth objects, which it could still detect, on the brand new NEOWISE (“Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer”) Post-Cryogenic Mission. Although the spacecraft spotted quite a few previously unseen asteroids and comets, including the primary asteroid discovered that shared Earth’s orbit, NASA ultimately shut down the telescope in February 2011.
But then, in December 2013, NASA woke the telescope from hibernation to present NEOWISE yet one more life, this one dedicated to supporting planetary defense efforts. Since then, the mission has discovered 215 asteroids and comets, including C/2020 F3 (itself called NEOWISE), which in 2020 became visible to the naked eye.
Alas, the NEOWISE spacecraft now faces a much more existential threat than a coolant shortage. Solar activity is now within the rising phase of its 11-year-long cycle. The surge in solar flares and coronal mass ejections is heating up and expanding Earth’s atmosphere, dragging the telescope lower and lower. Astronomers expect that, by 2025, the telescope will not be usable.
“After several years of calm, the sun is waking back up,” Masiero said. “We’re on the mercy of solar activity, and with no means to maintain us in orbit, NEOWISE is now slowly spiraling back to Earth.”