NASA Ends NEOWISE Asteroid Detection Spacecraft’s Mission After 10 Years

The NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, NASA’s asteroid-hunting space telescope, has retired after ten years of discovering and tracking NEOs (Near-Earth Objects).

The NEOWISE mission began with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission in 2009 with the goal of scanning the entire infrared sky to identify the brightest galaxies in the universe and locate the coldest and closest stars in our solar system. The WISE mission was a success and ended in 2011 when the telescope ran out of coolant that managed the heat produced by the spacecraft so that it didn’t interfere with its infrared observations.

After the mission ended, the spacecraft was put into hibernation until late 2013. When it was woken up, it was given a new mission—to detect asteroids and comets through their infrared signatures that pass very close to Earth and could be hazardous. The mission was named NEOWISE, which stands for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

You might wonder how the spacecraft could detect the infrared signatures of NEOs if the coolants were expired. While the lack of coolant prevented the space telescope from observing the faintest infrared objects, it was still able to precisely detect NEOs that generated a strong infrared signal from being heated by the Sun as they traveled past Earth.

During the NEOWISE mission, the spacecraft observed over 150,000 objects while spotting more than 3,000 NEOs, 215 of which were detected for the first time. The mission came to an end as there isn’t any onboard propulsion, so its engineers can’t change the spacecraft’s orbit to move it farther away from the Earth.

As a result, the spacecraft was commanded to turn off its transmitter on August 8th, while its survey was already concluded on July 31st. The Earth’s atmosphere is slowly dragging the spacecraft towards it, and by the end of this year, the spacecraft will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The end of the NEOWISE mission doesn’t mean that NASA will stop detecting NEOs. NASA is building a new space telescope called the NEO Surveyor, which is expected to launch in 2027. Its mission will be to detect dark asteroids and comets that don’t reflect much visible light, along with NEOs coming from the direction of the Sun.