14 DAY TRIAL // Although the weather appeared to be the biggest threat to a WISE launch today – with NASA officials forecasting an 80-percent chance of thunderstorms – it was in fact a small glitch that stopped the new infrared observatory from launching. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer was on track for its December 11 launch yesterday, but engineers discovered a minor anomaly in the booster steering engine aboard the Delta II delivery system. It was scheduled to boost the satellite to orbit today, between 1409 and 1423 GMT, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, Space reports.
According to experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the WISE mission will attempt to take off again on Monday, December 14, from the same launch facility. A launch window has been calculated to remain opened between 9:09 and 9:23 am EST (1409 and 1423 GMT), and mission controllers will attempt to make the best of it. The move may also be for the best, some say, because it will also give the weather a chance to clear out. Forecasters say that there is a pretty good chance the threatening lightning storms would clear the VAFB by Sunday, or early on Monday.
Other than the launch issues, everything is running fine. “Wise is chilled out. We've finished freezing the hydrogen that fills two tanks surrounding the science instrument. We're ready to explore the universe in infrared,” JPL Project Manager William Irace adds. He explains that, in order to be effective, WISE's instruments will be cooled almost to absolute zero. The coldest of these devices will operate at about eight degrees Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.
Other observatories, including NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, and NASA's upcoming Sofia and James Webb Space Telescope, will follow up on WISE's finds. The new instrument will map the entire sky using four infrared wavelengths, the American space agency reports. “With infrared, we can find the dark asteroids other surveys have missed and learn about the whole population. Are they mostly big, small, fluffy or hard?” JPL Wise project scientist Peter Eisenhardt says.
“We should find several hundred brown dwarfs that are currently unknown. Many brown dwarfs are too cool to be detected with visible light. WISE will see most of them. It would be quite exciting to know how many brown dwarfs there are and how old they are,” Edward L. Wright, the principal investigator of the mission, shares. He is also the David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).