Preliminary Results from the WISE Solar System Survey
Abstract
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) begun its imaging of the entire sky in early January 2010. With sensitivities in the mid-IR that are hundreds of times greater than previous surveys WISE is expected to observe roughly 700 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), 100.000 Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs) and thousands of Trojans, Comets and other outer Solar System objects. The WISE band-passes (3.4, 4.7, 12 & 22μm) will sample the flux from most inner-solar-system bodies near the peak of their thermal emission, and so will have a strong advantage for the detection of NEOs. There is a further advantage in that infrared observations are somewhat more sensitive to optically dark objects - those that are most likely to be missed in visible searches. But since the infrared flux of an asteroid is proportional to (1-albedo), which varies by a factor of 2.5, rather than albedo, which varies by a factor 25, the objects that will be discovered by the NEOWISE project will constitute an albedo-insensitive survey. We will present preliminary results of the NEOWISE survey from the first three months of WISE scan operations.
This research was funded in part by the NASA (ROSES) NEOO program.- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #216
- Pub Date:
- May 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AAS...21631204G