SCIENCE LAB. SCOOPS : CELESTIAL PHOTOGRAPHER

 

From an asteroid hunter - a last glimpse of the abyss : This month, scientists and engineers in Southern California got an exclusive glimpse at a recent snapshot of Fornax, a constellation of stars in the Southern Hemisphere.

The image itself is not particularly exciting, at least not to the untrained eye. But to those gathered, the image represented the last light of NASA's Near-Earth-Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, a telescope orbiting the Earth that spent more than a decade scanning the skies for asteroids and comets that could one day threaten our planet.

At the end of last month, the spacecraft survey concluded, and it closed its telescopic eyes for the last time.

''This was the little space telescope that could,'' said Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and principal investigator for NEOWISE.

When the mission was launched in 2009, it was known simply as WISE. It spent the next year peering at faraway objects in the universe radiating infrared light, including supermassive blackholes, brown dwarfs and dying stars.

WISE was never meant to study objects closer to Earth, but during its cosmic scans, scientists realized  '' it was pretty good at looking at asteroids, too,'' Dr.Mainz said.

One one scan, WISE discovered the first asteroid to share an orbit with Earth, known as a Trojan. It also observed a space rock named Dinkinesh, gathering data that came in handy years later on a recent NASA flyby of the object. [ Katrina Miller ]